Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World (7 page)

The indirect cause of the mayhem of 558–559, the Avars, now began to arrive on the doorstep of the empire themselves. In the early 560s they started demanding land from the Roman government, were refused, and entered Hungary.

The arrival of the Avars in the Ukraine a few years earlier had dislodged the Kutrigurs, with appalling results for the empire. Now the Avars’ own arrival in central Europe was to bring total destabilization to the continent and disaster to the empire.

First the Avars allied themselves with the Lombards, a Germanic people living in what is now the Czech and Slovak republics. On behalf of the Lombards, they attacked and completely destroyed the kingdom of the Gepids (modern eastern Hungary), which the Lombards hoped to get their hands on. But the Avars had no intention of handing over the newly acquired territory. Instead, they kept it for themselves and threatened to turn on their erstwhile allies.

Seeing what had befallen the Gepids, the Lombards fled west and invaded Roman-ruled Italy. There then followed a protracted war in which the Lombard refugees succeeded, over a period of some twenty-five years, in taking over the far north of Italy, most of Tuscany, and 75 percent of southern Italy. This new Lombard dimension changed Italian history forever.

Equally significant for subsequent European history were the repercussions that flowed from the tragic destruction of the Gepids. The Avars were not, in economic or social terms, the same as the Slav and other European barbarian peoples whose territories they invaded. They were nomad warrior pastoralists with experience of and an aptitude for empire building. They became a ruthless ruling elite—and where their swords cleared the way, their subject peoples, mainly Slavs, flowed in. Some of what had been Gepid land became populated by Slavs, and in the late 560s and 570s, under Avar encouragement, protection, and pressure, the Slavs moved into Moravia, Bohemia, and Germany as far west as the river Elbe.

Although the Avars themselves have long vanished into the mists of history, it is to them that the modern world owes much of the ethnic and political geography of modern eastern Europe. They were, to a large extent, a violent and catalytic phenomenon—a sort of bulldozer that often forced those in front to move on (to become someone else’s tormentors) and enabled those to its rear to benefit as allied subject colonists of new lands.

The Avars’ objective was to operate a massive protection racket of sorts. The Roman Empire was to be their milk cow, and (from c. 580 onward) the Slavs were to be the major instrument through which the racket would be made to work.

This heist went on for almost fifty years and netted the Avars at least seventy thousand pounds of gold (equivalent to around $11 billion in modern terms). It began in 572 when the Avars forced the Romans to start paying 80,000 gold
solidi
per year in so-called peace payments. Three years previously, the Avars had launched an unsuccessful attack on the Roman city of Sirmium (Sremska Mitrovica in modern Serbia), but in 571 the future emperor Tiberius had been defeated in an important battle in what is now northern Serbia, and the following year the Avars began demanding these payments in exchange for not invading the empire.

But in 578 the Avars were on the offensive once more, and again Sirmium was their target. If they were to extract an increased amount of gold from the Romans, it was essential that the strategically vital city be snatched from Roman control, for whoever controlled Sirmium controlled the route between the western and eastern parts of the empire. Roman control meant that Avar military use of the vital river Sava could be blocked or at least controlled and that Roman forces could use Sirmium as a base for penetrating Avar territory north of the river.

So it was that in 578 the Avars, under their ruler, the all-powerful
ka
gan
Baian, started one of the great sieges in European history. First, using captured Roman engineers, they cut the city off from the rest of the world by building two pontoon bridges across the river—one upstream of Sirmium, the other downstream. With the river firmly in Avar hands, an imperial relief expedition failed to break through. After two years of siege, the city was racked by starvation and disease. The desperate plight of its people was symbolized by a piece of graffiti found by archaeologists 1,300 years later. An unknown citizen had scrawled a message to God and posterity in ungrammatical Greek on a wall in the stricken town. “Lord Christ, help the city,” he wrote, “and smite the Avars and watch over the land of the Romans and the writer. Amen.”

Certainly from that day forth the “land of the Romans” was indeed in dire need of help. Sirmium was surrendered to the besieging barbarians, and as part of the surrender terms, the Roman authorities were allowed to evacuate the city’s surviving inhabitants.

With strategic Sirmium safely in their hands, the Avars demanded a 25 percent increase in the peace payments, to 100,000 gold
solidi
per year. Instead, the Roman emperor, a military man named Maurice, tried to fob the
kagan
off with a pet elephant and a solid gold bed. The
kagan,
who was nobody’s fool, sent them back and told the emperor he’d prefer cash—regularly.

Maurice, who was notorious even among his own troops for being somewhat careful with his money, said no. The Avar
kagan
was furious and promptly launched a new invasion. After seizing the neighboring city of Singidunum (now Belgrade), at the junction of the Sava and the Danube, the Avars swept eastward along the southern bank of the Danube and spent the winter of 583–584 on Roman territory on the Black Sea coast.

Within a few months, Maurice had capitulated to the
kagan
’s demands. The 25 percent increase was duly paid, and the Avar warriors were withdrawn back to Avar territory in present-day Serbia and Hungary.

But the
kagan
had several more aces up his military sleeve. Within just a few months, the Slavs living on Avar-controlled land invaded Roman territory—no doubt with Avar encouragement—and attacked the great city of Hadrianopolis (modern Edirne), just over a hundred miles west of Constantinople.

Having turned the screw tighter, the
kagan
seems then to have made yet more financial demands on the emperor—and was once again turned down. In the seventh-century book
The Miracles of St. Demetrius,
the author, Archbishop John of Thessalonica, described how “the chief of the Avars, having sent an embassy to the Emperor Maurice which met with a rebuff, then looked for means to inflict the greatest possible damage on him.”
⁴

The damage was done by a huge army of Avars and Slavs sent by the
kagan
into Greece. Parts of Corinth and the lower city of Athens were sacked. From Corinth, the canopy of the church was carried off. In Athens, archaeologists have found evidence of the destruction of the great marketplace.
⁵

The barbarian forces even tried to capture Thessalonica. On 22 September 586 a huge horde approached the city. “This was the greatest army that has ever been seen in our time,” wrote the author of
The Miracles of
St. Demetrius.
“It was estimated at more than 100,000 men and drank the rivers and wells dry and turned the land into desert.

“There was great terror in the city which, for its sins, saw now for the first time, and so close too, an army of barbarians, something never before seen by anyone except those who had been on active service far away. All faces were glum and dejected.”

The city had already been weakened and partially depopulated by a bout of plague that had raged there and in some other areas of the empire in 585 and the first half of 586. And yet the Avar attack failed. Thessalonica’s salvation was put down to the personal supernatural intervention of the city’s patron saint, St. Demetrius.

Further Avar attacks took place in 587, when the Thracian countryside was ravaged and looted, and in 588, when the barbarians actually reached the Sea of Marmara, fifty miles to the west of Constantinople. Once again, yet more peace payments induced the Avars to withdraw.

The Avar threat was still very real when, after signing a peace treaty with Persia in 591, Emperor Maurice moved large numbers of troops to the Avar front.
⁶
Under Avar pressure and encouragement, Slav tribes began, around 600, to expand from what is now Serbia into the Istrian Peninsula and down the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic. So by the start of the seventh century, thanks largely to the key role played by the Avars and to the effects of the plague, there was now a potential Avar/Slav threat all the way along the seven-hundred-mile Balkan frontier, and the Roman Empire was facing economic and military disaster.

DESTABILIZING
THE EMPIRE

R E V O L U T I O N

“I
n this terrible tragedy, the emperor demonstrated his courage for, when a nurse tried to substitute her own child for one of his, he would not allow it but pointed out his own child.¹ And, some report, milk flowed with the blood as the boy was killed so that all who saw it wept bitterly. And so at last the emperor, having shown himself above the law of nature, exchanged life for death. From that time on, vast disasters and many calamities continued to afflict the Roman Empire.”²

That is how the eighth- and ninth-century Greek historian Theophanes described a particularly poignant episode in the tragic execution of much of the imperial family during a popular yet bloody revolution that engulfed Constantinople in November 602. It was an event of pivotal importance in the history not only of the Roman Empire but of the world as a whole.

In a sense, its consequences still reverberate today, for it weakened the empire at a critical time and led directly to the de-Romanization of most of the Balkans, the loss of 70 percent of the empire, and, perhaps most significant, the rise of Islam.

But how did the mighty Roman Empire come to be humbled by a populist revolution?

A
s we have seen, for some thirty years the empire had been milked of vast quantities of gold, up to thirty thousand pounds of it—the protection money paid to the Avars. In addition, successive bouts of plague and war had reduced the empire’s population—and thereby its tax base—by up to a third.

Emperor Maurice’s solution was to try to make the army more productive, but at the same time not just to pay it less but to replace cash payments with payments in kind—usually of military equipment. Then he changed the war-booty apportionment system in such a way that the imperial government got a much larger slice and the soldiers a smaller one. None of this sat well with the army rank and file. Nor were they pleased with the emperor’s refusal to pay ransom money to the barbarians for the return of colleagues who had been captured.

One officer, speaking out against the imperial government, said the emperor’s “avarice produces nothing good and honest, but it is the mother of all troubles.”³ Furthermore, it was said that Maurice sent money to the clergy throughout the empire “in order to gain their prayers, so that he might make atonement in this world rather than the next.”
⁴

The last straw came when the emperor ordered the army to cross the Danube and spend the winter in barbarian territory. It refused to move, and in mid-November 602 it mutinied and chose as its leader an outspoken centurion by the name of Phocas—a ruthless soldier who was destined to become emperor within less than a fortnight.

Having concluded—correctly—that Phocas was “a lover of blood and slaughter,” Maurice took the precaution of mobilizing Constantinople’s home guard. He also staged a day of chariot races and other circus games in a last, desperate bid to prevent the population from being influenced by the mutiny, but the ploy backfired. At the games, one of the capital’s political factions—the so-called Greens
⁵
—shouted to the emperor that if he wanted to avoid bloodshed, he should sack his finance minister.
⁶

Theophanes wrote that at this juncture, the people “could not bear the rule of Maurice any longer” and invited the emperor’s eldest son, Theodosius, to become emperor, or, if he was unwilling, his father-in-law, Germanus. Maurice then tried to have Theodosius flogged and Germanus arrested. But the people protected them and rose in revolt, shouting, “Let any who love you, Maurice, be flayed alive.”