Lost to the West (20 page)

In the spring of 630, Heraclius made the pilgrimage to
Jerusalem, walking barefoot to Constantine’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre to return the True Cross to the Holy City. He was riding high on a wave of popularity, but he soon discovered that his triumph over the Persians brought with it the familiar specter of religious dissension. Syria and Egypt had always been Monophysite, and their re-absorption into the empire ensured that the religious debate was reopened with a vengeance. Such a state of affairs was an ominous weakness for the next invader to exploit, but where faith was involved, not even the conqueror of Persia could force his stubbornly independent inhabitants to fall into line.

The empire had been ravaged by the war with Persia, losing more than two hundred thousand men to the struggle, and now it was ripping itself apart internally as well. Despite the recent victory, the days of prosperity seemed long gone. Too many cities had been sacked and farms burned for the rhythms of everyday life to resume. Perhaps with time and stability the merchants and laborers would be coaxed back to their trades and prosperity would return, but the long, crippling war between Persia and Byzantium had left both empires exhausted. The cost of Heraclius’s great victory was a weakened and vulnerable empire, and the only saving grace was that Persia was in an even worse state. In 622, however, the very year Heraclius had set out on his great campaign, a new and infinitely more predatory enemy than Persia had been born.

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Transporting silks from the Far East was both expensive and slow, but fortunately for the empire, two monks had discovered the secrets of the silk moth’s life cycle and managed to smuggle several out of China. The delighted Justinian immediately planted mulberry trees in the capital to provide them with food, and Byzantium’s most lucrative industry was born.

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After he had completed the conquest of Italy, Justinian’s old commander Narses was recalled with an alarming lack of tact. The wife of Justinian’s successor mocked the ninety-year-old eunuch by sending him a golden distaff with a letter of dismissal. “Since you are not a man,” it supposedly read, “go spin wool with the women.” Enraged by the unnecessary insult after a lifetime of service, Narses muttered that “he would tie her such a knot that she would not unravel it in her lifetime.” Preparing to go into retirement in Naples, he spitefully invited the
long beards
—Lombards—into Italy. The peninsula was not united again until the risorgimento of the nineteenth century.

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The cross had been found in the Holy Land by Constantine the Great’s mother, Saint Helena, and was believed to be the very cross on which Christ was crucified.

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This was known as the Hodegetria and was the holiest relic in Byzantium. Believed to have been painted by Saint Luke himself, it was brought to Constantinople in the fifth century and installed in a monastery built specifically to house it.

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Shahin committed suicide after the battle to escape the wrath of his vicious overlord, but Chosroes II had the body packed in salt and transported to the capital. When it arrived, he had it whipped until it was no longer recognizable.

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Chosroes II certainly didn’t help matters with his conduct. After one battle he sent his defeated general a woman’s dress, provoking an instant rebellion.

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Scipio Africanus, the greatest of the Roman Republic’s military heroes, had defeated the mighty Hannibal and ended the Second Punic War.

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After his victory over the Persians Heraclius took their title of “King of Kings,” but thought better of it and stuck with the more modest
Basileus.

12

T
HE
H
OUSE OF
W
AR

With the Sword will I wash my shame away
.
—ABU TAMMAM, ninth-century Arab poet

T
he hot desert wastes of the Arabian Peninsula seemed neither particularly inviting nor threatening to the Byzantines, and there seemed no reason to suspect that they ever would. Populated by squabbling nomadic tribes, the region hardly seemed likely to pose a serious threat to anyone, much less the huge Byzantine state. In 622, however, the deserts were beginning to stir with a new energy as a man named Muhammad fled from Mecca to Medina and began hammering together the tribes of the interior. Infusing his followers with a burning zeal, Muhammad divided the world between
Dar al-Islam
(the House of Islam) and
Dar al-Harb
(the House of War). Their duty was a holy jihad, to expand the House of Islam at the point of a sword. Within five years, the Muslim armies were unleashed, and they exploded out of the desert with frightening speed. The timing of the invasion could hardly have been better. Hungry for conquest, the Arab armies arrived to find both great empires of the region exhausted and near collapse. The crippled Persians could put up little resistance. Their king Yazdegerd III appealed to both the Byzantines and the Chinese for help, but neither could offer any real assistance, and his fall was swift. Within a year, his tired armies were defeated, and he spent the next decade fleeing from one location to another until a local peasant killed him for his purse.

Muhammad died in 632 of a fever, but nothing seemed able to
slake his army’s desire for land. Not even pausing to digest the Persian Empire, by 633 they had crossed the deserted Byzantine frontier, and there they found a land ripe for the picking. Constantinople had never really been able to stamp out the Monophysite heresy, distracted as it was by the war with Persia, and when the Muslims arrived, they found the local populations eager to welcome them in. For the oppressed Monophysites, Islam, with its strict monotheism, was perfectly understandable, and the Arabs were at least Semites like themselves. Better to be ruled by their Arab cousins than the distant heretical emperors in Constantinople, especially since it was always easier to despise a heresy than a different faith. Putting up only token resistance, they watched as the Muslim army poured into Syria, sacked Damascus, and besieged Jerusalem.

In earlier days, the mighty emperor who had broken Persia would have come rushing to Palestine’s defense, but Heraclius was no longer the man he had once been. He was already suffering from the disease that was to kill him, his broad shoulders were prematurely stooped, his golden hair was reduced to a few gray strands, and—like his empire—he was near physical and emotional collapse. Having risen to such heights of glory, he now had to endure the agony of watching as his life’s work unraveled.

Slipping into Jerusalem, the emperor removed the True Cross from where he had placed it in triumph only six years before and headed for Constantinople, leaving the doomed city to its fate. While the patriarch carried out the odious task of surrendering the Holy City, the emperor made a pathetic last entrance into his capital, tormented by the belief that God had abandoned him. The citizens of Constantinople were inclined to agree with this view and were quick to point out why. The cause of all the imperial misery, they whispered, was Heraclius’s incestuous marriage to his niece, Martina. Of the nine children she bore her husband, only three were healthy—the rest either died in infancy or were deformed. Clearly, God had removed his favor, and Martina, never popular, became one of the most hated women in the city. Heraclius, who had delivered the empire in its hour
of need, ended his days in misery, deserted by the friends and courtiers who had loudly sung his praises in the years of triumph. A few years after the fall of Jerusalem, he expired, and was interred next to the body of Constantine the Great, in the imperial mausoleum of the Church of the Holy Apostles.

Heraclius’s reign had ended on a sour note, and his subjects certainly didn’t mourn his passing. Under his watch, the empire had lost huge swaths of its territory to a bewildering new enemy, and the dying emperor had hardly bothered to resist them. The shocked Byzantines had looked to Constantinople for help, terrified by the catastrophe, but had found only an agonized defeatism from their broken emperor.

But as poor as the empire’s fortunes were at Heraclius’s death, without him they would have been immeasurably worse. If he hadn’t arrived to overthrow Phocas, the empire would have fallen easy prey to the Persians; and when the Islamic tide came rushing out of Arabia, there would have been nothing to shield Europe from the flood. Instead, by combining a touch of Justinian’s vision with more than a hint of Belisarius’s generalship, Heraclius had made Constantinople a bulwark against Islamic aggression, diverting the Muslim advance into the long wastes of North Africa and delaying its entrance into Europe. His early years had seen one glorious victory after another, and had he died after the overthrow of Chosroes II, with the Persian Empire defeated and the True Cross restored to Jerusalem, his subjects would have remembered him as one of the greatest emperors to sit on the Byzantine throne.

His reign saw the great turning point for much of the Middle East. For a thousand years, these lands had been Hellenized, ruled by a Roman Empire at first pagan and then Christian. They had contributed much to classical civilization, providing some of the finest emperors, theologians, saints, and poets of the classical world. After the Arab invasions, however, all that changed. Arabic replaced Greek as the lingua franca, and Islam replaced Christianity. Wrenched out of the Mediterranean orbit, these lands began to look to Damascus, then Baghdad, instead of Rome or Constantinople. A way of life that had
more than a millennium came to a violent and abrupt end. Life in the Middle East would never be the same again.

O
f the next five emperors who succeeded Heraclius, only one was older than sixteen when he gained the throne, and all were crippled by the struggles of powerful factions to assert control. Each defeat further diminished their authority and crippled their ability to fight back. Had a stronger ruler than the dying Heraclius been on the throne to confront the Muslims in 633, the subsequent history of the entire Middle East would have been radically different, but he was a sick man, and the imperial teenagers who succeeded him couldn’t grab hold of power firmly enough to effectively oppose the Islamic advance. By the middle of the century, the opportunity to contain the threat had passed, and the Arab conquest picked up an irresistible momentum. Frightened Byzantine citizens paraded their holy icons around the walls, invoking divine aid, but still the Muslim tide rolled on, destroying centuries of Roman rule and leaving the empire profoundly shocked in its wake. To many, it must have seemed a terrible divine judgment, and the emotional trauma seemed to paralyze Byzantium.

The unwieldy imperial army was marshaled to defend the long frontier, but the Arabs seemed impossible to contain. The impenetrable desert had always offered a feeling of safety for the Byzantines, but now it was a terrifying weakness. Using the stars to navigate across the featureless landscape, the Arabs slaughtered the camels they rode to consume their water, and emerged unexpectedly behind imperial lines. Whenever the Byzantine army did manage to confront them, the Arabs simply melted back into the desert, only to erupt somewhere else. Only once did an imperial army try to follow them. In 636, it pursued a Muslim army to a tributary of the Jordan River and suffered an appalling defeat. Those who survived the initial fighting tried to surrender but were massacred on the spot. The watching Mediterranean world was put on terrible notice: For those who resisted the Islamic sword, there would be no mercy.

Unnerved by the speed and ferocity of the attack, the East virtually threw away its defenses. Eight years after conquering Jerusalem, the Arabs entered Egypt, and at the sight of the Muslim forces, Alexandria, seat of one of the five great patriarchates of the church, voluntarily surrendered. The dissident Christians who had invited the invaders in soon found their new masters to be considerably less tolerant than the orthodox regime they had swept away, but by then it was too late. A popular uprising ejected the Muslim garrison, but it returned with an army at its back. Battering their way inside, the forces of Islam razed the walls, burned what remained of the library, and moved the capital to Al-Fustat—a small village in the shadow of the pyramids that would later become Cairo.
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Only the waters of the Mediterranean seemed to form a barrier capable of checking the desert-dwelling Arabs, but they learned quickly. Navigating at sea was not so different from navigating in the desert, and within a decade, they had constructed a navy and inflicted a crushing defeat of the formerly invincible Byzantine navy.