Certainly, in the decades that followed the onset of the plague, there could be little doubt that the border zone beyond the Holy Land was indeed extending ever further south, into Arabia. That this was so reflected not the strength of the Christian empire, however, but its debilitation. A pronounced shift had occurred in the balance of power, not just in the region of the Fertile Crescent, but along the entire southern frontier. In Carthage, for instance, fretful commentators noted that, while the empire’s “once countless military units had dwindled in number, the plague, that ally of war, had not so much as touched the rancorous tribes.”68 It was as a consequence of this that the Berbers, natives of North Africa who lurked in the mountains beyond the reach of any imperial strike force, had begun to change from a nuisance to a threat. In Arabia, too, the desert nomads, spared the devastation of the pestilence, scented opportunity in the Romans’ agony. They may have lacked the teeming numbers of the Slavs or the Avars, but they too were increasingly on the move. By 600, entire populations of emigrants—muhajirun, in Arabic—had settled between Palestine and the Hijaz, the region of Arabia that abuts the upper half of the Red Sea. Tribes completely unknown to the imperial authorities only a few decades earlier—the Judham, the Amila and the Bali—now joined the roster of foederati. Whether they were truly to be reckoned as friends of the Roman people, however, or as troublesome intruders bought off with danger money, was not altogether clear. Bluff, even at the best of times, worked best without an excess of scrutiny.
Indisputable, however, was the fact that the authorities in Palestine did need allies to patrol a buffer zone for them. The same collapse in manpower and revenues as had afflicted the northern and western fronts had resulted in particularly devastating cuts along the frontier of the Holy Land. Indeed, ever since the arrival of the plague, it had effectively been demobilised. Forts stood abandoned to weeds, jackals and the odd ascetic. A radical streamlining—but informed, nevertheless, by a certain brutal logic. Predatory nomads might be a nuisance—but they scarcely compared in terms of menace with the House of Sasan. Sixty years after Khusrow had plundered the cities of Syria, the frontier with Iranshahr remained Roman strategists’ supreme priority, and the source of all their nightmares. Such resources as the empire could muster continued to be lavished on its garrisons. The consequence was, at a time when even the previously booming cities of Syria were afflicted by contraction and impoverishment, that the border zone with Iranshahr alone defied recession.69
And here, for those Arabs beyond the frontier keen to better themselves, was yet further scope for battening onto Roman gold. Not since the collapse of the spice trade had business conditions been more in their favour. It was not only Syria’s cities but its countryside that had been devastated by the plague. Repeated outbreaks had crippled agricultural production.70 Passers-by, observing the overgrown fields, the rotting apples and grapes, the feral cattle, sheep and goats, were moved to quote the words of the prophet Isaiah: “the earth shall be laid utterly waste and be utterly despoiled.”71 Yet garrisons, of course, still needed food for their messes, provender for their horses and pack animals, leather for their armour, shields and tents. Under normal circumstances, the costs of overland transport would hardly have made it worth the while of Arab merchants to trade in such basic commodities; but circumstances, in the wake of the plague, were very far from normal. The Arabs, for the first time in many centuries, found themselves major players in a sellers’ market.
Nor was it only the Romans who offered them ripe opportunity for doing business. The same pestilence that had so devastated Syria had brought ruin to Mesopotamia as well. Formidable though the Persians continued to appear when viewed from the watchtowers of Dara, the truth was that they too, no less than their western rivals, had found the legacy of the plague a devastating one. Khusrow’s successes—no less than Justinian’s—appeared to have left his empire only the more exposed. In 557, in the greatest triumph of his reign, he had succeeded in annihilating the Hephthalites once and for all, so that of the people who had once brought such ruin and humiliation upon Iranshahr nothing had remained but the memory of their name. Yet that victory had come at high cost. The battle had been won in alliance with the Turks: “an ugly, insolent, broad-faced, eyelashless mob.”72 These new arrivals, gorging themselves on their winnings, had soon established themselves as a presence on Iranshahr’s northern frontier no less menacing than the Hephthalites had ever been. Nomadic, and therefore largely unaffected by the plague, they were even more numerous than the Avars, whose khan they imperiously dismissed as a runaway slave. Khusrow, pressured from the north by the Turks and along the western front, as ever, by the Romans, had duly found himself locked into a struggle to defend his borders no less desperate than the one faced by Justinian. Still, into his ninth decade, he had been obliged to remain upon the campaign trail. By the time that he finally died, in 579, he had, so it was reliably reported, “lost his appetite for war.”73
The challenge of how to cope with the escalating crisis was inherited by his son, Hormizd. The solution attempted by the new Shahanshah—who would long be remembered for his “benevolence toward the weak and destitute”74—was to accuse the Parthian nobility of hoarding wealth that could better be spent by himself on succouring his needy people, and to aim, as not even Khusrow had dared to do, at the permanent breaking of their power. There was, of course, in this attempt at increased centralisation, more than an echo of the policies adopted by Justinian in the wake of the plague; but the Parthian nobility, unlike their Roman counterparts, had never been content merely to snipe and moan from the sidelines. In 590, the leader of the Mihran, a renowned general by the name of Bahram Chobin, suffered a minor reverse at the hands of the Romans, and was sent an outfit of women’s clothes to wear by a contemptuous Hormizd. Such, at any rate, was the story later told; and whether true or not, it is certain that the onset of the campaigning season saw Bahram Chobin marching, not against the Romans, but directly on Ctesiphon. The news of his approach was sufficient to inspire two other Parthian dynasts in the capital to stage a coup. Hormizd was toppled, blinded and put to death, all in brisk succession. His young son was thrust on to the throne and proclaimed Khusrow II. Not since the dark days following the death of Peroz, a hundred years previously, had the House of Sasan appeared more beleaguered.
And worse was to come. Bahram Chobin went further than even his most audacious ancestors had done. Rather than rest content with the toppling of Hormizd, he took the ultimate, the blasphemous step: he declared himself king. Here, for the Zoroastrian Church as much as for the House of Sasan, was a manoeuvre that threatened the breaking of the universe itself: for how could the one hope to survive without the other? Bahram Chobin, it seems, did not shrink from answering this question in the boldest terms imaginable. He was, so he declared, the living embodiment of the Fire of Mihr is Great. If it were true, as seemed entirely probable, that the End Days were approaching, then clearly Iranshahr needed not so much a king as a saviour. This, mimicking the strategy of Mazdak, was precisely what Bahram Chobin claimed to be. Far from ducking the mowbeds’ charge that his rebellion threatened the end of the world, he seems openly to have revelled in the fact.75