Admittedly, those who pushed this particular theory did tend to have axes to grind.49 Justinian, never popular with the traditional elite at the best of times, had hardly risen in their estimation by taking such strenuous measures, in the years before his death, to slash the budget deficit. Nothing about him quite so infernal, in the opinion of stymied tax-dodgers, as what they bitterly dismissed as his “avarice.” Nevertheless, it was hardly necessary to believe that the imperial throne had genuinely been occupied by “the Lord of Demons”50 to dread that the gates of hell might be yawning increasingly wide. Zoroastrian priests were not alone in warning their flocks that time itself was destined to come to an end, amid a titanic death-struggle between good and evil. The same mood of mingled terror and hope that had inspired Mazdak to declare that the horizon was not far off, that the great climax of things was drawing near, had repeatedly haunted the imaginings of the Christian people, too. Christ Himself had warned His disciples what to expect: His own return, like lightning that “comes from the east and shines as far as the west”;51 His sitting in judgement over the living and the dead; His delivery of the wicked to eternal punishment, and of the righteous to eternal life. And the day and hour of these events? Not even the angels themselves, so Christ had declared, could be sure of that. Nevertheless, certain clues, certain signs, would herald for the faithful the coming of the Day of Judgement: “For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes in various places.”52
In the wake of Justinian’s reign, this was a message as unsettling as any in scripture. The plague, after its initial devastating eruption, had still not abated. By striking seemingly at random, at different times and in different places, it cast a perpetual shadow of menace. “Its recurrence,” so a lawyer in Antioch recorded in numb despair, “has seen me lose, at various times, several of my children, my wife, and many of my kin, not to mention numerous servants, both in town and in the country.”53 Time would see him lose a grandson as welclass="underline" a pattern of bereavement repeated across the empire and far beyond. Yet pestilence was only one of the harbingers of the End Days to have afflicted the Roman people. Prior to the plague’s appearance, back in 536, a mysterious dust cloud had cast the world into darkness for months.54 Then, in December 557, a terrible earthquake had shaken Constantinople, rocking it so severely that the dome of Hagia Sophia had collapsed the following spring, necessitating years of repairs. Most ominous of all, in 559, an army of barbarians had crossed the frozen Danube and struck so far south as to menace Greece and the capital itself. Constantinople had been preserved from seemingly inevitable ruin only by the desperate summoning of Belisarius out of retirement: for the aged general, frail though he had become, had lost none of his aptitude for winning victories. Elsewhere, however, the rising tempo of barbarian assaults had proved less easy to repulse. Bands of migratory peasants known as Slavs had been infiltrating the Balkans since the 540s, when the plague had first harrowed the region. Then, from beyond the Danube, a tribe of peculiarly brutal savages, steppe-land nomads named the Avars, had started to make alarming demands for danger money. Most demoralising of all, perhaps, was the descent upon Italy in 568 of a shaven-headed, long-bearded people called the Lombards, who in next to no time had succeeded in dismembering Constantinople’s hard-won mastery of the peninsula for good. Less than a decade after the death of Justinian, and imperial control had been pegged back to a corridor of land between Ravenna and Rome. So much blood, so much destruction—and all in vain.
How were these catastrophic eruptions to be explained? On one level, the answer was very simple. Nomads, by and large, had proved immune to the reach of the plague. As a result, whether descending across the Danube or from the Alps, they usually vastly outnumbered the local garrisons. Even Belisarius, in his last-ditch defence of Constantinople, had been able to muster only a few hundred veterans, and had depended largely for his victory on a rag-bag of peasants, and plenty of bluff. Elsewhere, for all the conscientiousness with which Justinian had devoted his tax revenues to the construction of fortresses along the empire’s frontiers, not even the most bristling of walls could be made serviceable without soldiers to man them. Time and again, as barbarian horsemen advanced into Roman territory, they would find themselves passing fields that stood overgrown, and villages that lay abandoned. Whole stretches of the empire, to all intents and purposes, were now “deserted.”55
All of this had long been foretold. Christ had not been alone in warning of how the world was destined to end. Jewish prophets and Christian saints alike had predicted that fearsome and savage hordes would descend on God’s people “like a cloud covering the land”56 in the run-up to the End Days: hordes to whom, in the Bible, had been given the sinister names “Gog” and “Magog.” The hint of dark mystery in all this had been sufficient, as the world had become increasingly Christian, and barbarians ever more of a threat, to prompt much heated speculation. Who were Gog and Magog? Where were they lurking? Why would they not materialise until the end of time? The answers to these questions had been found, somewhat unexpectedly, in the biography of Alexander the Great. Historians had long known that the famous conqueror, in the course of his global travels, had discovered a mountain pass on the edge of the world, which he had sealed with “iron gates.”57 Over the centuries, this story had been much improved. By the time of Justinian, it was known for a fact that the gates had been faced with bronze; that the peoples they had served to imprison had been none other than Gog and Magog; and that Alexander, upon whom “the Spirit of the Lord rested,”58 had built them with the direct encouragement of an angel.
To the Christian people of Alexandria, this was not wholly bad news, perhaps. It provided a welcome reassurance: that the founder of their city, despite his regrettable taste for sporting the horns of a pagan demon, had all along been a self-proclaimed servant of God.59 By and large, however, the implications were unnerving in the extreme. It was hard, with barbarians gathering outside the walls of Constantinople and the whole world seemingly on the move, to avoid the obvious conclusion: that yet another portent of the End Days had arrived upon the scene. The bolts set on Alexander’s gates, so many dreaded, were starting to crumple, and buckle, and give. Beyond them, straining to be released upon the world, were waiting Gog and Magog—fiends so terrible that they thought nothing of drinking the blood of babies and snacking on kittens. Before the onset of such invaders, then, who could say what the fate of the world would be?