Everyone knew that Syrians were “natural businessmen, and the greediest of mortals.”17 It was hardly surprising, then, that disapproving moralists were inclined to see in the chaos and clamour of their cities monstrous infernos of worldliness. Such a perspective, though, was not entirely proportionate. The Syrians, for all their love of money, were much given to the contempt of it as well. The same people whose “devotion to profit takes them across the whole world”18 were also celebrated for their stylites. While they no longer lavished their wealth on beautifying cities, they did not merely squander or hoard it, either. “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor.” Here were words that pious Syrians—wealthy ones included—had engraved on their hearts. If the giving of alms to the poor lacked the ready visual impact that the construction of a theatre, say, or a bath-house would have done, then the poor most likely did not much care. Not all the decay of a city’s pagan monuments could disguise the emergence, obtruding through the shabbiness of the old, of an entirely new cityscape: one characterised by hospitals, orphanages and homes for the aged. Blithely indifferent to the miseries of the poor though many Syrian plutocrats remained, enough of them were not to have made some kind of a difference. Public welfare, in a Christian city, had become the surest mark of wealth.
And Khusrow knew it. Leading his army deep into Syria, finding city after city effectively defenceless, Khusrow soon discovered that those who were in the habit of giving to charity were quite prepared to cough up danger money, too. Bishops, frantic to protect their flocks from annihilation, had only to catch a rumour of the Shahanshah’s approach and they would scrabble to meet his demands for gold, no matter how outrageous. But Khusrow, even as he swaggered and plundered his way across Syria, had more in mind than mere extortion: he wanted to stage a spectacular. Accordingly, he aimed directly for the richest prize of all, “the fair crown of the East,”19 a city so globally celebrated that scholars in the far-off land of China invariably muddled it with Constantinople: Antioch.
News of the Persian advance, in Antioch itself, threw the citizens into a state of disbelieving panic. Rich their city might have been—but it was also, even by Syrian standards, quite exceptionally run-down. Over the course of several decades, its wretched inhabitants had suffered a whole succession of calamities: riots, fires, earthquakes. The vast circuit of walls was so cracked and pockmarked that the city was, to all intents and purposes, without defences. Frantically, however, the people of Antioch did all they could to prepare for the looming onslaught: by sending to Palmyra and Damascus for reinforcements, and to Simeon on his pillar for a miracle. The news brought back from the stylite, however, could hardly have been any bleaker. God Himself, speaking to Simeon in a vision, had revealed His plans for Antioch—and they were terrible. “I will fill her with her enemies,” so the Almighty had declared, “and I will abandon the greater part of her population to the sword, and those who survive to captivity.”20
And so it came to pass. Although Simeon himself, courtesy of a divinely dispatched mist, managed to avoid capture by the Persians, the people of Antioch were not so fortunate. Despite a valiant initial defence, their city was soon overrun, put to the torch, and left in ruins. Khusrow, pausing only to have a celebratory dip in the Mediterranean, then turned on his heels and returned to Iranshahr in triumph. He took with him long wagon-trains of gold and the survivors from Antioch—some thirty thousand people. Back in Mesopotamia, the Shahanshah settled these captives in a new city, built from scratch just outside Ctesiphon: a crowing statement of triumph, inscribed emphatically in fresh mud-brick. Its name was Veh-Antioch-Khusrow—“Khusrow-Made-This-City-Better-Than-Antioch.”
To the Romans, and to Justinian in particular, the rape of Syria—and the flattening of its famous capital—was a bitter humiliation. Four years earlier, shortly before the invasion of Italy, the emperor had proclaimed his hopes that “God will consent to our establishing our dominion over all of those whom in former times the Roman people ruled, from the boundaries of the one ocean to the other, but lost by their negligence.”21 Now, so it began to be whispered, Justinian’s own negligence had turned Italy into a wilderness and Antioch into a desert. In the space of only a year, so it seemed, all his triumphs had turned to dust. Was it possible, some began to wonder, that the very attempt to repair the world had only worsened its fractures?
Justinian himself had no patience with such pessimism. Amid all the sudden calamities that had engulfed him and his dream of fashioning a globe-spanning Christian order, he still maintained his invincible confidence that he was serving the will of God. But disaster was not done with him yet. As the calamitous year of Antioch’s sack drew to a close, a horror of barely comprehensible proportions was drawing near to the southernmost borders of his empire.
It threatened not merely the fracture but the annihilation of the world.
The Earth Shall Sit in Mourning
Late summer, 541, and the Egyptian sun was at its most broiling. Those who lived along the shoreline might well have turned their faces to the sea, for the blessed relief that a breeze on the cheeks could bring. That August, however, there was something eerie to be seen out on the water—a sight fit, not to cool, but to chill the blood. Phantasms were sailing the sea. As the sun set and twilight thickened to darkness, dozens of spectral bronze ships, glowing like fire, grew more distinct on the horizon. Sitting on their decks were men with bronze staffs: “And those who travelled in these glittering boats, moving at an unearthly speed across the sea, were black—and they had no heads.”22 Soon enough, it became clear that these ghostly apparitions were not appearing merely at random, but were tracking along the coast; by the end of the month, one fleet of the bronze ships had left Egyptian waters altogether and were observed off Gaza. Meanwhile, a second fleet was heading westwards. Past the various mouths of the Nile it glided until, as August turned into September, it had almost left the delta behind. Ahead stood the greatest port in the entire Mediterranean, where the sight of red and orange light flickering on night-time waves was hardly a novelty: for its harbours boasted a watchtower of such stupefying height that the beacon which blazed from the summit of the structure could be seen up to fifty miles out at sea. Wonders, certainly, were nothing new at Alexandria.
The very name of the city bore witness to its glamorous pedigree. Not even Constantinople could boast a founder to compare with Alexander the Great. Planted on the Mediterranean coast, fashioned out of the marble which had long served as the badge of cosmopolitan chic, and with the Pharos, its astounding lighthouse, to illumine the international shipping-lanes, the city had always defined itself as haughtily, indeed defiantly, Greek. Its inhabitants liked to call it “Alexandria-by-Egypt”—as though to do otherwise might risk their being submerged beneath the peasant-worked mud of the Nile. Geography could not be totally denied, though. Right from the beginning, Alexandria had been touched by schizophrenia. Alexander, travelling to the spit of land on which he would found his great city, had journeyed from Siwa, an oracle in the depths of the western desert, where Amun, the ram-headed king of the Egyptian gods, had revealed to him the secrets of his destiny—and instructed him, it may be, to found Alexandria.23 This was why, on coins minted by his successors, the great conqueror had often been shown sporting the two curling horns of Amun: an image that had perfectly fused traditions of Greek portraiture with those of the ancient and mysterious land that Alexander had brought beneath his rule. In similar manner, the greatest temple in Alexandria—a massive complex of shrines, libraries and lecture halls named the Serapeum—had been raised in honour of Serapis, a deity who combined a thoroughly Greek beard and robe with a primordially Egyptian lineage.a Artificially multicultural the god may have been—but that was precisely what had rendered him the perfect patron for a city such as Alexandria, created as it had been from nothing, and poised between two very different worlds.