Count Belisarius (13 page)

That was the last that the hunters saw of Porphyry; after cruising about for a few days they returned. The crew had talked matters over among themselves, and agreed on a story that satisfied their pride. According to them, Belisarius had shot with his bow but missed, and they had then shot with the catapult. The spear had gone straight into Porphyry's open jaws, but Porphyry had bitten the shaft off and gone away bellowing, with the head of the spear deeply embedded in his throat. ‘Soon he will die of his wounds,' they boasted, ‘and you will recognize our spear-head by its colour.' The Greens refused to accept these claims, particularly as Belisarius had not supported them. All that he would say was: ‘The militia-men fought their catapult energetically and showed themselves accurate marksmen. I have handed in
an official report to his Serenity the Emperor. Doubtless he will publish it, in due course.' But, for the honour of the Blues, Justin withheld the report.

Porphyry continued to destroy nets and shipping for many year after this. The Greens, though convinced that the Blues had been cowards, were not anxious to make fools of themselves by volunteering to put an end to Porphyry.

T
HE
Emperor of the Romans and the Great King of the Persians are ancient enemies; yet they think of themselves, together, as the twin eyes of the world and as the joint light-houses of civilization. Each finds the existence of the other a comfort to him in the loneliness of his sacred office, and there is a note of comradeship which constantly recurs in the royal letters that they exchange – in time of war no less than in time of peace. They greet each other like two veteran backgammon players who play together in the wine-shop every day for the price of the day's drinks. One eye, or one light-house, shines over a great part of Europe, and over Asia Minor, and part of Africa; the other, over immense territories in Greater Asia. It is true that in both cases the sovereignty exercised over many regions is only titular. The Persian cannot control such distant satrapies as Bactria and Sogdiana and Arachosia; and the Roman, at the time of which I am writing, had in all but title lost Britain to the Picts and Saxons, Gaul to the Franks and Burgundians, North Africa to the Vandals and Moors, Spain to one nation of Goths, and Italy, with Rome itself, to the other. Nevertheless, the true control of a large part of the world remained, and remains, in the power of one or the other, and so also does the nominal control of another large part.

Fortunately for world peace, there are deserts of sand and great rocky uplands intervening between the two realms for practically the entire length of their common frontier – which runs from the eastern end of the Black Sea through Armenia and behind Syria and Palestine to the northern end of the Red Sea. Seldom in the history of the world have Western armies succeeded in conquering parts of Asia beyond these boundaries, or Eastern armies overflowed into Europe or Africa. Even when this has happened the invasion has not been lasting. Xerxes the Persian failed to conquer Greece, despite the immense armies he brought over into Europe by his bridge of boats across the Hellespont; Alexander the Greek conquered Persia, but his swollen Empire did not survive his death. More usually the invaders from either side have been defeated close to the frontier; or, if successful, have not attempted
to retain the territories occupied, but have retired home after exacting tribute in some form or other. Such conflicts have almost all taken place in Mesopotamia, in the region between the upper waters of Euphrates and Tigris. This is the most convenient campaigning ground – which, however, favours the Persians in the matter of ready access to food depots and garrison towns.

For several centuries after the time of Alexander, the Persian Empire was known as the Parthian because the Arsacids, the ruling dynasty, were of Parthian origin; but, about a hundred years before Constantine turned Christian and transferred the capital of the Empire from Rome to Constantinople, a descendant of the old Persian Kings, by name Artaxerxes, had revolted and overthrown the Arsacids. His new dynasty, the Sassanids, restored the Persian name and tradition to the Empire and has maintained itself in power ever since. (At the time of which I write, Kobad, the nineteenth of the line, wore the regal diadem.) The Sassanids had purified and strengthened the ancient religion of the Persians, which is the worship of fire according to the revelation of the Prophet and Mage Zoroaster. This religion had been much corrupted by Greek philosophy – as the ancient Roman and Jewish religions had also been, and the Christian religion too. (Compare the fine, simple story contained in the four Gospels, obviously born among illiterate peasants and fishermen who had never studied either grammar or rhetoric, with the wearisome philosophic Christianity of our time!) But King Artaxerxes banished all the philosophers from his realm. They returned to us with Persian notions and inflicted on Christianity a new heresy, the Manichean. These Manichees have hit upon a totally original theory of the nature of Christ. They hold that it was dual, and not only dual but contradictory: Jesus, the historical man, being imperfect and a sinner, and Christ, his spiritual counterpart, being a Divine Deliverer. Manichees are hated both in Persia and Christendom, and I have not a word to say in their defence. The Persians encourage them only in Persian Armenia, in order to weaken the bonds of religious sympathy between that country, which is Christian, and Roman Armenia, which is Christian too and rigidly Orthodox.

By forbidding talk of an unnecessary sort – this is all that philosophy appears to be to a practical person like me – and ordering a return to a primitive directness of action, speech, and thought, Artaxerxes restored the native power of the Persians alike in the civil and
military sides of government. Great wars were waged between his descendants and successive Roman Emperors, in which, on the whole, the Persians had the advantage. But the fourteenth of the line was Bahram the Hunter, so called because he had a passion for hunting the wild ass of the desert. He became involved in a war with us because he persecuted Christians as fanatically almost as we persecute our fellow-Christians; and was conquered in battle and forced to pledge his royal honour to keep the peace for a hundred years. His sons and grandsons, for fear of provoking the anger of his ghost, kept the peace strictly, and the hundred years did not expire until modern times. Then, as I have already mentioned, war broke out again, and Anastasius's army, disgracefully led, was disgracefully defeated. This was the campaign which the burgess Simeon had witnessed.

The quarrel had several causes, but the chief of these was the wholesale price of silk. Silk is a material for clothes that is far superior in coolness, lightness, and handsome appearance to any other known. It was invented by a primitive Chinese queen, and for centuries it has been imported from China by sea and land for the use of rich and wellbred people and for dancing girls and prostitutes and such; and from a rare luxury it has become a common vanity. Silk takes dye readily, especially the purple dye of the shell-fish. Cotton is another useful importation from the East, principally from India; it is the fibrous flower of a marshy shrub, and can be woven into a light, tough cloth, cooler than woollens and easy to wash. However, cotton has not the glossiness or fineness of silk. There was never any mystery about cotton; but what the nature and origin of silk was nobody but the Chinese themselves knew, and they would not reveal the secret, because they wished to preserve their most valuable monopoly. Raw silk came to us in yellowish skeins wound on grass-stalks, each skein containing a certain weight of thread. Natural historians guessed that it was the thread of a gigantic Chinese spider, but others believed that it was fibre drawn from the bark of a certain palm-tree, and still others that it was made from the scrapings of the furry undersides of mulberry leaves. However, nobody could prove his own view to be the correct one, because our relations with China have always been maintained through middlemen – except for a short period 400 years ago when our ships sailed directly into the ports of Southern China. We have dealt either with the Persian merchant colony in Ceylon, by the sea-route, or with Persia itself, by the land-route. The silk caravans from
China take 150 days to reach the Persian frontier by way of Bokhara and Samarkand, and another eighty to reach our frontier by way of Nisibis on the upper Euphrates; from thence a journey of twenty days brings the silk to Constantinople. The sea-voyage is perhaps less hazardous, but the silk must go through the hands of the Abyssinian traders of the Red Sea, and thus pay a double toll.

As the demand increased, the Chinese merchants raised the price of raw silk; and the Persians, unwilling that the Chinese should be the only ones to profit, increased the re-sale price more than was equable. Then our merchants, unable to make any profit by buying at this rate, decided to deal direct with the Chinese, if possible, by reopening an old trade-route passing to the north of the Persian territories, beyond the Caspian Sea: this long but practical route entered our territory through a narrow pass of the Caucasus mountains, to the east of the Black Sea and at the boundary of Colchis, a rich land friendly to us. It was to Colchis that Jason of old went in company with the Argonauts to fetch back the Golden Fleece; which was, I think, a parable of Eastern riches brought by this northern route. In deciding to reopen it, our merchants were aware that they must pay toll to the savage Huns through whose territory it passed, but hoped that they would be satisfied with less money than the Persians. The nearest and most powerful of these tribes were the White Hums, so called because they were European in appearance, unlike the other Huns, who seem to us a sort of evil yellow animal. They lived between the Caspian and the Black Seas and were inveterate enemies of the Persians. A timely gift to these White Huns to persuade them to attack Persia from the north had more than once saved our frontiers from serious invasion.

But the merchants' plan failed. The Persians heard of it and persuaded the Chinese to deal only with themselves. Then King Kobad wrote sarcastically to the Emperor Anastasius that the White Huns had now made him responsible for the toll that the Romans had promised to pay them for the use of the northern route. If Anastasius still wished to buy silk, he must therefore first lend the Persian Government money with which to appease the disappointed Huns. Anastasius, of course, refused this demand with indignation, so Kobad invaded Roman Armenia with a small but well-trained army, besieging the important city of Amida on the Upper Tigris. Anastasius despatched an army of 52,000 men to its relief, entrusting its command, however, not to a single worthless general, as was customary, but to
several worthless generals of equal rank – who constantly opposed one another's plans and could not agree on any single point. This huge force was therefore beaten, division by division, in several pitched engagements; and some parts of it fled without daring to come to grips at all. Our name thus won such discredit in the East that had Kobad not been distracted by a Hunnish invasion from the north – Anastasius had bought the services of the White Huns by paying the promised toll twice over – he would doubtless have attempted to overrun all Syria and Asia Minor, and doubtless would have succeeded. He had already taken Amida after a long siege, owing to the negligence of certain Armenian monks, supposed to be on sentry duty at one of the towers, who had eaten and drunk too generously after a long fast and fallen asleep: the Persians crept into this tower by an old underground passage that they had discovered and slaughtered the monks, every one. At the assault Kobad himself showed great energy for a man of sixty years. Mounting a scaling-ladder, sword in hand, he threatened to run any Persian through who turned back. It is said that the Persian Mages had dissuaded him from raising the siege, as he had intended to do when it grew wearisome, because of a sign: a group of prostitutes on the walls had taunted the Persians by lifting up their skirts at them, exclaiming, ‘Come in and enjoy yourselves.' The Mages interpreted this as a sign that the city would soon reveal her secrets to them; and the discovery of the hidden passage proved them right, Kobad, returning to give battle to the White Huns, left a garrison of a thousand men behind at Amida, who succeeded in holding the city against the Roman relief-force and only consented to evacuate it, two years after its capture, on payment of 70,000 gold pieces.

Peace was concluded for seven years between Anastasius and Kobad, but continued much longer, because Anastasius was too weak and Kobad too preoccupied to continue the struggle. But two hostile acts were committed, one by each side. Kobad seized the Caspian Gates, the pass through the Caucasus through which our caravans were to have gone in search of silk; and Anastasius fortified the open city of Daras, close to the Persian frontier and commanding the main road joining the two countries.

To give an explanation of what these acts signified. The Caspian Gates are of great strategical importance. They are the only practical pass through the lofty and terrible Caucasus range, which acts as a barrier for many hundreds of miles between the broad Asiatic steppes,
where the nomad Huns roam, and our civilized world. Alexander the Great had been the first to appreciate fully the importance of this pass, which is seven miles long and begins, at the end nearest to us, with a natural door, set in precipitous cliffs, that can be defended by a small garrison. He built a castle there, and it has been held by many different princes in the last eight or nine hundred years. The present constable was a Christianized Hun, whose grazing-lands on this side of the mountain the castle protected against the heathen Huns on the other.

This constable felt death approaching and, being able to place little reliance on the good sense or courage of his sons, wrote to Anastasius, who had shown him many marks of favour, and offered to sell him the castle and the pass for a few thousand gold pieces. Anastasius called his principal senators together and asked them for their opinion on the matter, which they gave as follows: ‘The Caspian Gates would have been of great commercial importance to Your Sacred Majesty, had you been able to use the northern caravan-route for direct trade with China; but as this has been denied you by Persian intrigue there is no profit to be derived from them. Your Majesty will realize that the present constable, or his sons, will continue to hold the fortress without any inducement from you, merely to restrain raiders from the steppes from overrunning their own country. Moreover, to post a Roman garrison there would be both dangerous and expensive: for the Caspian Gates are situated two hundred miles beyond the eastern end of the Black Sea, and more than that distance from the Diocese of Pontus, which is the nearest of Your Clemency's personal dominions on the southern shores of that Sea: the Persian satrapy of Iberia lies between. We therefore advise Your Greatness to thank this Hun most courteously and to send him a worthy gift, but not to throw good money after bad; the Eastern frontier has already cost the Empire too dear.'