Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World Read online

  The other victims that year were either burned alive after having their hands and feet cut off, strangled, or simply beheaded. Entire families were wiped out, notably any relatives of Maurice and the former general, Comentiolus, whom Phocas had disliked even before the mutiny.

  While Constantinople reeked of fear and of spilled patrician blood, the Persians seized the Roman Empire’s Armenian and eastern Anatolian provinces and began to threaten its very heartland. However, at last, Phocas’ power began to ebb away. Revolt started to erupt all over the empire. There was civil unrest in Constantinople; many citizens were killed or thrown into prison. The Greens, formerly Phocas’ supporters, accused him of drunken lunacy. “You have drunk again from the goblet, you are losing your senses again,” they shouted.18 But the increasingly paranoid emperor responded by “chopping off the limbs of many of them and hanging them in the middle of the [city’s chariot-racing] stadium.” Others he beheaded or “tied in sacks and threw into the open sea.”

  At this point civil war broke out in earnest. In the capital, the Greens rioted, burned the city administrative offices, and opened up the prisons. In Antioch the Jewish population also staged a revolt and seized the local Christian patriarch, stuffing his severed testicles into his mouth and dragging him, still alive, through the city before killing him. The homes of the rich were then burned to the ground. In the great north African city of Carthage, the son of the region’s leading politician—a young man called Heraclius—set sail with a fleet of ships bound ultimately for Constantinople. His aim was to remove Phocas and become emperor himself.

  Meanwhile, numerous other plots were hatched against the emperor and yet more people were arrested and executed. Phocas, it seems, had grown bored with conventional beheadings, so he ordered one leading official to be used for archery target practice in the stadium and then had him suspended alive from a flagstaff at the emperor’s favorite barracks.

  At last Heraclius’ fleet reached Constantinople, and Phocas’ reign came to an abrupt and fitting end. The Greens and others seized him and burned him alive. But while internally the nightmare was over, externally the empire’s problems were only just beginning.

  6

  “ T H E C U P O F

  B I T T E R N E S S ”

  Although the empire’s internal bloodletting had largely come to an end with the accession of Heraclius, the process by which it was to lose 70 percent of its territory within thirty years continued apace. The destabilization of the empire’s relationship with the Persians and barbarians alike, which had followed the mutiny of 602, had done its damage. Pandora’s box had been opened, and the utmost efforts of even such a determined and stubborn ruler as Heraclius could not put the lid back on.

  Theophanes, describing the chaotic state into which the empire had slipped, wrote that “Heraclius, on becoming emperor, found the whole Roman state in a terrible condition.

  “For the Barbarians [the Avars and Slavs] had made Europe a desert, while the Persians had given over all Asia to ravaging and had led whole cities into captivity and had constantly swallowed up whole Roman armies.

  “On seeing this, the emperor had grave doubts about what to do. For the army had entirely disintegrated. Of all the officers who had rebelled with Phocas against Maurice and were still alive, he found, on enquiry, only two still remaining with the legions.”

  In the northwestern part of the empire, the Slavs smashed through Roman forces in the Istrian Peninsula and attacked all the major Roman towns of the Adriatic coast. Within three years most of the cities, some of the most prosperous in Europe, lay in ruins. The majority of the citizens had fled, their towns—Salona, Scardona, Narona, Risinium, Doclea, and Epidaurum—reduced to smoldering hulks.

  Refugees either emigrated to Italy or poured into a few key defensible sites along the coast. The inhabitants of Epidaurum made their way to the coast and founded a new city, Ragusium (modern Dubrovnik). The refugees, determined to stand their ground in their new home, built a massive circuit of defensive walls, and survived. A few miles away the people of Risinium were probably responsible for the founding of Cattaro (modern Kotor in Montenegro). And 140 miles to the north, the people of Salona fled to the nearby coastal town of Split, where they converted the mausoleum of the third-century emperor Diocletian into a cathedral.¹ However, the much-venerated relics of Salona’s martyrs were spirited off to Rome as the Slavs closed in. Split, which had declined in the fifth and sixth centuries, was rebuilt by the refugees and became an important town. (Five hundred years later it was to play a vital role in helping to create the medieval Croatian state.)

  All three places of refuge had one major thing in common: their access to water. Unlike the inland towns the refugees had fled from, Dubrovnik and Split were directly on the sea, while Kotor was on a fjordlike inlet. If necessary, all three could receive supplies from the sea, so barbarian land sieges would have been uncomfortable and inconvenient but not fatal.

  Meanwhile, other Slav tribes—“an immense horde of Drogubites, Sagudates, Belegezites, Baiounetes and Berzetes”—descended on Greece and even attacked the Greek islands and parts of Anatolia (now Turkey).² It was at this time—roughly 610–620—that Greece underwent fundamental change at the hands of the barbarians. The largely Mediterranean ethnic makeup of Classical and Roman Greece was altered irreversibly as tens of thousands of Slav warriors invaded the area and then settled their families throughout the country.

  An analysis of the surviving place names in Greece reveals that virtually every area of the country had substantial Slav communities from this time onward; indeed, several regions must have had majority Slav populations. Place-name research carried out in the 1930s by a German called Vasmer showed that even in this century around two thousand Slav place names survived throughout Greece.³ Seven hundred and thirty of them were found in northern Greece; a further 509 were in central Greece, 429 in the Peloponnese, and 382 in the rest of southern Greece.4

  It was at this period that the Slavs appear to have started making use of seagoing boats for their military operations, raiding the Cyclades and the islands off Thessaly. What’s more, much of this maritime expansion seems to have been carried out through the skilled use of nothing more sophisticated than large dugout canoes. “They had discovered how to make boats dug out from a single tree trunk,” explained the author of The Miracles of St. Demetrius. Modern analysis of place-name evidence confirms that they reached the islands, though to sail to some they must surely have had larger boats, perhaps captured ones.5

  As we have seen, the Slavs poured out from the Avar empire, so their expansion has to be seen as having not simply the Avars’ blessing but also their encouragement and possibly even participation. In 615 the Slavs had even given a share of their plunder to the kagan, a fact that suggests they were acting as Avar surrogates. Moreover, they told the kagan that if he wanted more loot, he should actually provide Avar troops for the next attack.6 From late 617 or early 618, specifically Avar forces (rather than their surrogates) swept into Roman territory and came within a few miles of Constantinople. The kagan’s plan seems to have been to first plunder and then extract protection money. In 623 the Avars broke a temporary truce and made an unexpected attack on Heraclius.

  “The emperor was panic-stricken by this unforeseen event and fled back to the city,” Theophanes wrote. “The Barbarian captured all the emperor’s equipment and anything else he could seize, and then withdrew.” The towns of Thrace were all plundered.

  By 626 Avar pressure for protection money was increasing, and they were threatening Constantinople itself. Another surprise attack brought them to the walls of the capital.

  “His forces reached the Golden Gate, taking everything they could find outside the walls and in the suburbs, men and animals, as plunder,” wrote the anonymous author of the Chronicon Paschale.

  “They forced their way into the holy Church of Saints Cosmas and Damien in Blachernae, and into the Church of the Holy Archangel the other side of
the city in the suburb of Promotus. They not only took the chalices and other church plate but also broke up the altars of the churches. They then removed everything, including their prisoners, across the Danube and there was no resistance.”

  Meanwhile in Asia, the Persian War—which had begun following Phocas’ revolution—continued to humble the empire. In 611 the Persians occupied Cappadocia and Antioch, and by 613 they had seized Damascus. The following year the Roman imperial system was dealt a double blow, one with both territorial and religious dimensions, when the Persian army captured Christianity’s most sacred city, Jerusalem.

  With the loss of Jerusalem, the morale of the empire was irreparably damaged. Psychologically it was perhaps the single greatest blow of the Persian War. The Persian army slaughtered thousands of Jerusalem’s Christians and (according to the cleric Antiochus Strategus) took thousands more as captives to Mesopotamia, where “by the waters of Babylon” they “sat down and wept.”7

  Yet more Christians perished from heat and overcrowding in a makeshift prison established by the Persians, and age-old religious, ethnic, and cultural conflict reemerged between Jews and Christians, resulting in further Christian deaths. What’s more, the Persians seized and took back to Mesopotamia Christendom’s most holy relic, fragments of a wooden cross believed by the faithful to be the very one on which Christ had died.8

  From this point on, a dangerous spirit of defeatism seems to have taken root in the Roman Empire. Certainly the blame for the loss of Jerusalem was heaped not on the “evil Persians,” who were the “hated of God,” but on God himself, who had used the Persian army “as a rod of chastisement and as a medicine of rebuke” against the Romans.9

  What was happening to the empire was beginning to be seen as God’s will. Describing the scene as the Persian army moved in for the kill, Antiochus revealed the depths of Roman fatalism, which had by now reached almost apocalyptic levels.

  “And as we knew not God nor observed His commandments, God delivered us into the hands of our enemies. The Lord has given over this Holy City to the enemy,” he wrote.

  “The Persians perceived that God had forsaken the Christians and that they had no helper,” so with “increased wrath” they began to build in a circuit around the city great wooden towers “on which they placed catapults.

  “The struggle lasted 20 days, shooting their catapults with such force that on the 21st day they broke down the city wall. At this, the evil enemy entered the city in great fury, like angry wild beasts and enraged serpents.

  “The men defending the walls fled to hide in caverns, conduits and cisterns to save themselves; and the people fled in crowds to the churches and their altars and there they were slaughtered.

  “For the enemy entered in great wrath, gnashing their teeth in violent fury; like evil beasts they roared, like lions they bellowed, like ferocious serpents they hissed, and slew all they found.

  “Like mad dogs they tore with their teeth the flesh of the faithful, respecting no one, neither man nor woman, neither young nor old, neither child nor baby, neither priest nor monk, neither virgin nor widow.

  “They destroyed persons of every age, slaughtering them like animals, cut them to pieces, mowed many down like cabbages, so that every individual had to drain the full cup of bitterness.”

  After the city had fallen, Antiochus Strategus went on to describe what a group of fleeing Jerusalemites saw as they looked back at their city: “Once more, they raised up their eyes and gazed upon Jerusalem and its holy churches.

  “A flame as from a furnace reached up to the clouds as it burnt.

  “Then they fell to sobbing and lamenting loudly and all together. Some smote themselves on their face, others rubbed their faces in the dust, others strewed ashes on their heads, others tore their hair when they beheld the [Church of the] Holy Resurrection on fire. [The Church of] Sion [enveloped] in smoke and flames, and Jerusalem devastated.”

  Soon the whole of Egypt and Libya as well as the Levant was in Persian hands, and in 616 a Persian army arrived on the eastern bank of the Bosphorus, less than a mile of water away from Constantinople.

  Would the capital suffer the same fate as Jerusalem? Again the Romans saw what they believed to be their impending doom as the will of God—a punishment from on high for the conduct of their empire, especially for the sins of Phocas’ revolution. A group of Roman magnates sent a letter across the Bosphorus to the Persian king in which they virtually trembled with guilt and fear.

  “Attacked by you as a reward for our sins, the affairs of the Romans have reached this sorry state of weakness,” they wrote.10

  They abjectly begged that “your most great majesty, your most peace-loving majesty”—referred to by the Romans in less awkward times as “the Hated of God”—might make peace “by the Grace of God” as soon as possible. “We also beseech your gentleness that you hold our most pious Emperor Heraclius as a true son of yours, for he is ready in all things to concede to Your Serenity due reverence and duty.

  “For if you do this, you will acquire a double glory, first for fortitude in war and then for granting peace.

  “We ourselves would enjoy your never-to-be-forgotten gift of tranquillity, and it would be an occasion for us to offer daily prayers for your life. As long as the Roman Empire lasts, your beneficence would never fall into oblivion among its recipients,” the magnates groveled.

  The empire had indeed become humble in its desperation. The currency was on the verge of collapse, and soon the loss of territory also began to reduce food supplies for Constantinople. In 618 government bread distribution was stopped. Three-quarters of the empire had been lost: The Levant, Syria, Egypt, Libya, and most of Anatolia had fallen to Persia, while much of Thrace, Greece, and Italy had been overrun by Avar, Slav, and (in Italy) Lombard barbarians. With the Avar and Persian armies preparing for the kill, the virtually bankrupt Roman government, holed up in Constantinople, appealed to the Church in 622 to hand over its gold and silver treasures, its church plate and altar fixtures, to pay for the empire’s preservation. Something in the region of 200,000 pounds of gold (worth in modern terms around $32 billion) was collected, ostensibly to raise a new army against the Persians.

  However, within a few months the Avars, who had no doubt heard of the emperor’s newfound “wealth,” forced the Romans to double their protection payments to 200,000 gold solidi per year.

  By 626 Constantinople was completely surrounded. The situation appeared hopeless. The Avars and their Slav vassals were just outside the city to the west, while just across the Bosphorus to the east was the Persian army. They were in contact with each other and acted in concert.

  The Avar kagan—also “the Hated of God” as far as the Romans were concerned—even offered the people of the capital a deal whereby they would lose their worldly wealth yet save their lives.

  “If any of you in the city wish to leave it, with only your shoes and shirt, then let us make a pact and treaty with my friend Shahbaraz [the Persian general],” the kagan told a delegation of citizens.11 “If you cross over to him, he will do you no injury. Leave your city and your fortunes to me, for there is no other way for you to find safety, unless you turn yourselves into fish and escape by sea, or into birds and fly off through the air,” he warned.

  But 626 was to be a temporary turning point in the fortunes of the empire, for in the end the Avar attack failed and the Persians were beaten back.

  Over the next four years, Emperor Heraclius managed to retake all the lost lands of western Asia and North Africa. But the cost in cash and manpower of this twenty-five-year-long war had been massive for both the Roman Empire and Persia.

  For the former it was a Pyrrhic victory, but for the latter it was a prelude to final catastrophe. From the 540s onward, the mounting cumulative effect of plague and barbarian attacks had caused financial problems that in turn had led to mutiny and revolution. That pivotal event—Phocas’ takeover—had furnished the Persians with the excuse to attack the empire
at its weakest moment, and that very weakness had resulted in the length of the war and the empire’s temporary loss of territory. The immediate result was that by the end of the war in 630, both sides were exhausted militarily and financially.

  7

  C H A N G I N G T H E E M P I R E:

  T H E C U M U L A T I V E I M P A C T

  O F T H E P L A G U E A N D

  T H E A V A R S

  Though millions died from the plague, it would be an oversimplification to say that the disease alone brought the Roman Empire to death’s door. Its role was more complicated than that.

  As we have seen, plague deaths reduced the tax base, and to compensate, the imperial government increased the rate of taxation. Along with Avar protection money demands, this played a crucial role in creating the difficult financial circumstances that destabilized the army, the empire, and the geopolitical status quo in the revolutionary events of 602.

  In the period 541–602 there had been dozens of plague outbreaks, including four major epidemics. The empire’s population had shrunk by around a third, and its GNP had been reduced by at least 10 percent, possibly by as much as 15 percent.¹ By 602 it had therefore lost wealth equivalent to at least 30 million gold solidi due to plague. In addition to that, the empire had paid over the years a couple of million solidi in protection payments to the Avars, and over 5 million solidi had been lost as a result of Avar and Slav occupation of land in the Balkans.