A Burning Sea

by Theodore Brun

  The year before he took the throne, when still Strategos of the Anatolikon Theme and the empire’s most powerful general, Leo had deceived the Arab General Maslama in a secret meeting somewhere near the city of Amorium in central Anatolia. Leo somehow convinced Maslama that, if the Arab withdrew his troops south from Amorium for a while, this would enable Leo to march unchallenged on Constantinople and take the throne as emperor, on the understanding that he would then meekly submit to the sovereignty of the Caliph Sulayman. Of course, Leo had no intention of honouring this agreement. Once he had taken the throne, he set about preparing the city’s defence. In spite of this it seems that Maslama was remarkably reluctant to acknowledge that he had been tricked. Leo’s boast that, were Maslama a woman he would do whatever Leo wanted, comes – perhaps tellingly – from an Arab source recounting the events of the siege.

  All the historians I have read of this period are agreed: had Constantinople fallen, there would have been little to stop the Umayyad dynasty swallowing up the rest of Europe in their ever-burgeoning empire. The acquisition of an asset as valuable and strategic as Constantinople would likely have strengthened the Umayyad Caliphs beyond challenge. As it was, their eventual downfall came from within.

  The events of the siege itself are much as I described. The Arab land forces arrived on 15 August AD 716 to the west of the city. The Arab fleet arrived two weeks later on 1 September. However, the land walls and the so-called ‘Greek fire’ proved insurmountable obstacles to their success.

  There had been a prophecy among the mystics of Damascus: that the toppling of the old Christian order and Islam’s assumption of its place as the hegemon of the age would come to pass within a hundred years of Mohammad’s death. This prophecy offered a further tantalizing detail: that this supreme victory would be achieved by a caliph who bore the name of one of the prophets of old. A generation before, the great warlord Caliph Muawiya had tried and failed to decapitate the faltering Roman Empire in his five-year siege of Constantinople from AD 678 to 682. Surely the Caliph Sulayman (the Arabic form of ‘Solomon’) was divinely ordained to succeed where his grandsire had failed?

  The auspices appeared good; the odds, heavily in the Arabs’ favour. Sulayman’s brother, Prince Maslama, commanded an army and fleet of astonishing size, unrivalled in strength and resource. They ran roughshod over the empire’s dwindling possessions in Asia Minor (Anatolia), advancing almost unchallenged to the gates of Constantinople.

  That was about as far as their luck held. Prophecy or no, Maslama’s massive army seemed pitted against the hand of God almost from the outset. The Byzantines’ diabolically effective weapon – known as Greek fire by their enemies and hydron pyr (‘liquid fire’) by themselves – wreaked havoc on the very day of the Arab fleet’s arrival. (As described.) The wind dropped, the huge war-ships in the rearguard of the fleet found themselves becalmed, and the Byzantine fire-ships coolly destroyed two dozen of them without suffering a single casualty.

  The impenetrability of the walls of Constantinople, defending the landward side of the city, was well attested for over a millennium. First constructed during the reign of Emperor Theodosius II in the fourth century AD, they were the brainchild of an architect named Anthemius. The walls stood intact practically until the city’s final capitulation to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. True, Constantinople had been sacked before that, in 1204, although that was achieved through treachery. It took the invention of gunpowder – and a shady arms deal between an unlikely Hungarian and the Turks – to finally blow a breach through the massive stone defences. The rest, as they say, is history.

  Maslama, of course, did not have such explosive means at his disposal. Katāros’s attempt to ‘give him the keys’ was an invention of mine – albeit one mixed with a grain of truth since the Emperor Justinian II had somehow snuck into the city through the Blachernae sector of the walls when he seized back the throne for the second period of his reign. Although it remains a mystery exactly how. For the Arabs, there was no easy breakthrough and thus Maslama’s host was forced to settle in for a longer siege. The winter that followed was the hardest in memory. The chronicler Theophanes attests that snow settled on the ground for a hundred days – something unheard of at the time – and given the paucity of cover and dwindling food supplies, this made the hardships of the besieging Arab army almost unendurable. All but cut off from the rest of the Umayyad Caliphate, Maslama’s army languished. When Caliph Sulayman also died suddenly that winter, it seemed the prophecy had proved a false hope. Nevertheless, Sulayman’s successor, a younger brother named Umar, was determined not to abandon his half-brother Maslama and his army to their fate. He promised to send a reinforcing fleet in the spring to re-supply Maslama, hoping to tip the balance back in the besiegers’ favour. Alas, he had counted neither on Emperor Leo’s cunning nor his extensive network of spies. According to Theophanes, when the Arab fleet Umar had assembled in Egypt arrived at the Bosporus straits and anchored offshore from Chalcedon, many of their Christian crewmen deserted and crossed the straits in small boats, hailing their emperor with shouts of acclamation. The imperial fire-ships moved in and destroyed most of the Egyptian vessels – still laden with their precious cargo of grain that was so vital to the Arab army’s relief.

  It was the Bulgars who delivered the coup de grâce, albeit not quite in the way I described. There was indeed a treaty existing between the Bulgar nation and the empire, agreed between Khan Tervel, his son Kosmeniy, and Leo’s predecessor Theodosios III (whom Leo had deposed). Whether there was any serious doubt that the Bulgars would honour their part of the agreement, it is not recorded. What is known is that Bulgar raids were a continual thorn in the side of Maslama’s besieging army, and these seemed to culminate in a larger action that took place in midsummer of 717, during which the Bulgars routed the beleaguered remains of the Arab army and left twenty thousand of them dead on the field of battle.

  For the purposes of my story, I have the two events occurring on the same day when in fact they probably took place two or three months apart. Nevertheless, together they dealt the death blow to Maslama’s giddy dreams of absolute victory. In mid-August 717, what was left of the Arab fleet evacuated the miserable remains of Maslama’s army. Alas, their troubles were not over. A terrible storm engulfed the fleet and only five vessels survived the voyage home. The expedition’s failure was total and abject. No small wonder that the Byzantine chroniclers attributed the successful defence of the city to the providence of God.

  Although wars between the two empires continued, the Arabs never again made an attempt to knock out Constantinople, and no historian, ancient or modern, denies that the repulse of the Arab advance at the doorstep of mainland Europe marked a decisive moment in that continent’s history. It should be added that eventually Arab and Byzantine reached an accommodation with each other, settling into an uneasy coexistence for the next three or four centuries. It took the encroachment of an outsider people – the Seljuk Turks – to upset the balance once again and stir up renewed animosity between Christian and Muslim. In time this development was answered by other outsiders from the West, the Latins, in the form of the first Crusades. This, some four hundred years after the astonishing gains of the early Muslim conquests.

  As to the efficacy of Greek fire, any interested readers can find a reconstruction of the Byzantines’ secret weapon (by historian Richard Windley) on YouTube – both in its syphon form and as a primitive kind of hand grenade. Although the exact methodology and formulation of the substance that created Greek fire is a secret lost to history, the reconstruction represents something pretty similar, and demonstrates without any doubt how effective technology very like it could be.

  Despite his successful defence of Constantinople, Leo the Isaurian’s reputation was indeed trashed in the years that followed. He may have saved the empire in its most critical hour, but he was to become known ever after as the original iconoclast. Like many emperors before and after him, he found himself embroiled in matters t
heological, to the scorn of the religious authorities that followed. He took issue with the apparent idolatrous worship of icons and, believing any form of idolatry literally put the survival of the empire in jeopardy – being a flagrant provocation to the judgement of God – Leo took steps to prevent it. He presided over an orgy of destruction of the multitude of icons that adorned nearly every wall in the city and beyond. It is my view (and the view of one or two other historians I’ve read) that he did this in good faith as an act of expedience to protect the empire. But posterity did not see his acts of destruction with much sympathy. The violently divisive question of iconoclasm was eventually settled a century later in favour of the iconodules – those who favoured the reverence of icons – who would for ever afterwards cast Leo in a rather villainous light, his achievement of saving the empire conveniently forgotten. History is written by the victors; but also, often as not, by the priests.

  A final word on Azazel.

  Only one reader, to my knowledge, has recognized that the Watcher, aka the Witch King, aka Azazel, is a figure who harks back even beyond the murky depths of Norse mythology into a still more ancient text: the Book of Enoch.

  This is an old Jewish text ascribed to Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah. Whether truly that old, the oldest section within it is called the Book of the Watchers. It is a more detailed telling of the story of the fallen angels cast down to Earth from heaven, which appears in brief in the sixth chapter of the book of Genesis. Although the Book of Enoch is not part of the Old Testament canon, it does appear to be quoted by both Jesus and Paul in the New Testament.

  Within it, Azazel is described as one of the fallen angels rebelling before the time of the Flood. According to Enoch, he ‘taught men in the art of warfare, of making swords and knives, shields, and coats of mail, and taught women the art of deception by ornamenting the body, dyeing the hair, and painting the face and the eyebrows, and also revealed to the people the secrets of witchcraft, leading them into various wickedness and impurity’ until, at Yahweh’s command, the archangel Raphael is sent to Earth to bind him hand and foot and chain him underground in utter darkness to await his final judgement with the other demons.

  As far as ancient demonic influence goes, Azazel is second to none.

  With regard to the deliverance of demonic possession (or oppression), the testimony of how this transpires is remarkably consistent – whether in the Gospel of Luke or numerous medieval texts or memoirs you can find in any Christian bookshop today, or indeed speaking with individuals who have experience of this phenomenon up to the current time in many different cultures, including our own. I have tried to stay true to the common manifestations, both objective and subjective. I suppose in the face of so much testimonial evidence one could still hold to the view that such things are not real. But alas, my faith is not that strong.

  In the end, this is a book not about demonic bondage but about freedom. I suppose the question now arises: having gained one’s freedom, what should one do with it?

  The answer, perhaps, lies further down the Wanderer’s road.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Unlike A Sacred Storm, which began life as half a book that was reformed into one, A Burning Sea grew and grew until it had become as long as two books which, at last, I have now reduced to one. You will not be surprised to hear that neither method is a particularly efficient way of writing a novel. Still, one is learning. . .

  The odd moment of wishing to throw the whole thing on the fire aside, it is with profound satisfaction that I can finally release A Burning Sea into the wild. And not a little relief. Several people deserve my thanks for this:

  First, my (now former) editor at Corvus Atlantic, Sara O’Keeffe. This novel is dedicated to you because it is no exaggeration to say that without your input it would (and probably should) have died a horrible death at the manuscript stage. They say an editor can only get out of an author what is already there. Sara, you have had to mine the depths of my reserves in order to bring to light the story I wanted to tell. I shall miss your passion for Erlan’s adventures, as well as your calm words of wisdom. Happily our friendship will sail on unchecked.

  The other pillar on which this book stands is my beloved wife, Natasha. A small writer’s tip in passing: should you ever wish to write an epic novel, best to delay either procreation or relocation. Ideally both. We have managed to forge our way through a very intense eighteen months. I would not have been able to get through them without your love and support – not to mention your little gems of advice for this novel. I love and trust you more than ever.

  As always, I would like to thank the wonderful team at Corvus Atlantic, ably skippered by Will Atkinson. Specific mentions also to Susannah Hamilton, Poppy Mostyn-Owen, Jamie Forrest, Patrick Hunter, Giulia Fossati, Kate Straker, and Clive Kintoff. After three novels with you all, I feel part of the Corvus family. Besides these, I want to make special mention to Sarah Hodgson, my new editor. Thank you for picking up this one halfway through and running with it. I’m excited to see what we can do with the next volume.

  Charlie Campbell, ever my unruffled friend and agent (in that order), with sage advice and a knack for keeping my feet firmly on the ground. Thank you. Your encouragement never fails to pop up at just the right moment.

  Mary Chamberlain, my copy-editor, has done a brilliant job with the final tinker and polish. Thanks to her for her keen eye.

  Two friends who need thanking for their technical advice: Dom Muir for matters spiritual; and Justin Hill for tipping me off with a handy text for world-building eighth-century Byzantium. (Daily Life in the Byzantine Empire by Marcus Rautman, in case you were wondering.)

  I must mention Lucie Kolackova who won an auction bid to have a character named after her. Thank you for the loan of your name to Lucia!

  I’m always grateful to my family and friends, to my fellow authors, and to my readers, for their goodwill and encouragement. It is such a pleasure when readers get in touch and say that they have enjoyed the books. I would particularly like to thank Steve Denton (aka ‘Speesh Reads’) whose generous reviews alone would be enough to keep me in the writing game.

  And finally. . .

  To Ella – you are gorgeous, brilliant, and so much fun (when you’re not being a misanthrope). To TT – my world would be so diminished without the joy you bring to me every single day. And to Colette – you are lying there asleep next to me as I write this, tiny and perfectly formed. I can’t wait to get to know you.

  T.H.R.B.

  December 2019