The steppes – and the Mongols
If the Empire’s authorities, mariners and the commercial leadership of the Atlantic coast provinces had not yet discovered America, the likeliest area for conquest would have been the continuation of the ‘Drang nach Osten’ into the Ukraine as far as the Dneiper or the Don. This could not have been achieved until the defeat of the Mongols, who presumably would have arrived there in 1237–40 as in reality and with luck would have been defeated as they threatened Poland in 1241/2. The Mongols would have faced a united Europe under a military leadership used to fighting nomads from the steppes since the time of Attila, probably with Greek fire to match the Mongols’ Chinese fire-crackers and certainly with all the Classical world’s military technology. They would not have been allowed to rampage as far as Poland and Hungary without a major challenge, even assuming that Rome had not bothered to annex the emerging Slavic kingdom in Poland or the Slavic-Viking principalities of Russia. There was constant interest in real-life Byzantium in developments on the steppes, as shown in Constantine VII’s strategic ‘handbook’ De Administrando Imperio of around 950.22 The Empire(s) would have been aware of the Mongol threat at least since the defeat of the Sultanate of Khwarezm in 1219–20, and a large army could have moved into Russia to meet them as they arrived in 1237. If not, then the united forces of Western Europe would have been available to meet the advancing army of Batu in Poland or Hungary, instead of the Mongols being able to take on one kingdom at a time. The Romans would have been able to put together an army of 60–80,000 if necessary to meet the Mongols, whose numbers are unclear but vastly outnumbered their real-life enemies, on much more equal terms
The extent of the Mongol threat would have been such as to require military co-operation by both Empires to defeat it, and afterwards one or other Empire would have been anxious to secure the steppes from further threat to the settled lands to the West. Remaining Turkic or Mongolian tribes, such as any Volga Bulgars or Cumans/Polovtsians the Mongols had not destroyed, would have been Roman vassals. Granted the previous Roman practice of building up reliable buffer states against major enemies, e.g. the screen of client kingdoms in the eastern Mediterranean between Rome and Parthia, the Roman leadership should have been keen to use local peoples to reduce the threat of the Mongols returning. Logically, the Empire would have encouraged any non-Mongol tribal forces remaining independent in Siberia or Turkestan to act as Roman clients, and taken a greater interest in Russian and steppe affairs.
Constructing forts to defend the Empire was not an option, as there was no easily defensible line of frontier. The Urals were too low to provide a barrier to nomadic raiding and the lower Volga too long to be patrolled. If the Mongols proceeded to set up the same subordinate Khanates across the region east of the Urals as they did in reality, the ‘Jagatai’ Khanate would have been emerging after the 1240s among that part of the Mongol army settled in Turkestan and the ‘Ilkhanate’ would duly have taken over Persia. (See next section on the Eastern Empire.) It would have been in Rome’s interests to seek to stir up warfare between these states and the Great Khan in Karakorum (China after the 1260s) to keep the Mongols fighting each other, and as the Mongols were animists, to convert them to Christianity as allies. Any settlement nearer the Roman European frontier, by the ‘Golden Horde’ on the Don and lower Volga, or by the ‘Nogaj’ khanate in Wallachia, would have been a major source of concern until it was either destroyed or converted into an ally, seeming an heir to the threat posed in the fifth century by Attila.
Religion – an Imperial-led ‘Reformation’?
The flux of theological speculation apparent among Christians before their religion became the state cult had seen a variety of doctrines competing for attention. Despite the simplistic view of the ‘Dan Brown’ school of modern writers, the fixing of a definitive, orthodox theology for all citizens to follow at Constantine I’s Council of Nicaea in 325 was not an innovation by the new alliance of Emperor and bishops – or an Imperial hijacking of a multifaceted Church debate into rigid control by a new doctrine. The now dominant Catholic doctrines had developed within Christian thought since the first century, particularly regarding the precise nature of Christ’s mixture of human and divine attributes. They had always held the adherence of the senior bishoprics, among whom the See of Rome (later the Papacy) was already particularly venerated in the West and was pushing its claims as a source of authority by the third century.23
A majority of the Church’s leadership were Catholic well before Constantine’s time, holding that this was the doctrinal position established by the Apostles and St.Paul; the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles were already defined as the core of the emerging New Testament and most of the other books eventually included in it were already accepted before 300. The definitive list of books, and thus of acceptable teachings, was not established until Bishop (St.) Athanasius of Alexandria drew up a list in 367,24 but the acceptance of the unorthodox writings in the ‘Gnostic’ Gospels, known to be second century, not from the Apostles’ lifetimes, was never considered.25 They were certainly not suppressed by the Church fathers or Constantine at Nicaea, and senior churchmen concerned for unity were denouncing such Gnostic innovation and potential for unseemly controversy (and disorder) in the third century. After Nicaea, the latest such heresy, the new doctrine of the Egyptian presbyter Arius on Christ having a human not a human and divine nature, was still a threat to the Catholic dominance, and Constantine himself made unsuccessful efforts to reach a compromise with the theologian and draw him into a state church. A desire for a tidy and ordered bureaucratic Church, an ecclesiastical equivalent of the civil and military systems established across the Empire since Diocletian’s reforms, was apparent. It was not limited to Christian Emperors; Diocletian had sought to enforce precise pagan religious ritual for all citizens across the Empire and the most vehement pagan enforcer, Maximin Daia, had set up a hierarchy of State-funded pagan priesthoods like that which Constantine was to set up for the Church.26 A disciplined hierarchy of bishops was now set up, led by the Patriarchs in the major cities of the Empire (Rome, with Constantinople added after Constantine’s time as the new Imperial capital, and the apostolic sees of Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem) with a metropolitan see in each provincial capital controlling the bishops of that province, and there was no room for dissent in religious as in civil life. The establishment of a state Church was duly accompanied by a definition of doctrine to be followed, the Nicene Creed, still the basis of Catholic belief, and the eviction of bishops and junior clerics who would not subscribe to it.
This centralised edifice was the religious counterpart of the late Roman secular and military state, with hierarchy and order dominant, and it was clearly designed to make religious life mirror secular affairs but in theological terms to to reflect the Heavenly order too. In due course the Emperor, now ‘Equal of the Apostles’ as Constantine had proclaimed himself and taking a lead in Church councils, began to participate in a round of religious rituals at his ‘Sacred Palace’ that reflected his semi-divine status and religious role.27 The notion of the Emperor as a semi-divine figure had been present to some degree since the early Empire in the more religiousminded East, and had received a boost in the troubled third century when coinage had presented him as the helper or equal of the Empire’s protective deities. The end of the Western Empire prevented it from continuing in the West, but it became central to the Imperial office and its round of palace and Church ceremonial in the Eastern Empire.
The potential winning of an Emperor to back a doctrine other than Catholicism was a major flaw for the new Constantinian Church system. What one Emperor had granted, another could take away. In due course, the Arians achieved the support of Constantine’s son Constantius II, ruler of the East from 337 and the West from 352/3–61, and he started to appoint senior Arian clerics in place of Catholics; the Council of Sardica (Sofia) in 342–3 saw deadlock between the differing views of theologians backed by the Catholic Western an
d Arian Eastern rulers. Julian, a recidivist Catholic turned pagan, attempted to undermine both doctrines and issued legislation against Church privileges, thus ending the legal advantages that were inducing many citizens to convert from the traditional pagan beliefs; a further move towards a state Arian Church in the East was attempted by Valens (364–78) and in the West the regent Justina attempted to put Arians on an equal legal footing with Catholics in Italy in the late 370s to the fury of Bishop Ambrose of Milan. Catholic doctrine only became firmly established with draconian legal support, as it happened, permanently in the West, under Theodosius the Great, and the fifth century was to see the emergence of two new doctrines, Nestorianism and Monophysitism, in the East.
The first threat to Orthodoxy, Nestorianism, failed to win a foothold in Constantinople in the late 420s despite its eponymous originator being patriarch. The militant Catholic patriarchs of Alexandria secured the backing of the wavering Theodosius II, Nestorius was sacked and deported to an isolated monastery, and his doctrine secured backing in Syria and Mesopotamia but was driven underground and only flourished within Persia beyond Roman control. It later set up a mission in China, and in 1287 a Chinese Nestorian mission from Kubilai Khan arrived in Constantinople and Rome. Monophysitism secured Theodosius’ backing in 448–9 thanks to Court patrons, was driven out of the capital after his death in 450, but had two subsequent Imperial patrons, Basiliscus, quickly overthrown, and Anastasius who faced Catholic rebellion from Vitalian, and became the dominant theology in Syria and Egypt. Even the obsessively orthodox and persecuting Justinian could not secure one all-embracing Imperial Church of conformists, not least due to his wife Theodora’s support for the Monophysites. The state Church in Egypt, the ‘Melkites’ or ‘King’s/Royal party’, appear to have been in the minority by the seventh century and some historians have argued that state attempts to crush the Monophysites encouraged them to prefer Arab rule.
The Catholic doctrine remained dominant in the West, although there was an intellectual challenge to official theology from Pelagius, probably a Briton, in the 400s which orthodox leaders such as Augustine of Hippo insisted needed suppression. Notably, the Constantinopolitan government’s attempts at creating a third way theology to reunite orthodox and Monophysites in the seventh century, the ‘Monothelete’ doctrine and the ‘Type’, failed to win many adherants in Roman controlled lands in the West. The same could have been expected of any Eastern Imperial or Church innovations in a continuing Roman Empire; the Papacy in the eighth century was uncompromisingly opposed to Iconoclasm. It is unlikely that any Western Emperor would have been sufficiently interested in the relatively arcane issue of the theological meaning of religious art, (was it idolatry to venerate a depiction of Christ, the Virgin, or a saint?), to hold a council altering doctrine. Theological debate had always been a popular passion in Constantinople, as testified to in the mid-fourth century, but the Western Church was less riven by furious debate and Pelagianism and Priscillianism, a minor Spanish heresy of the 380s, were their sole contributions to late Roman theological controversy.28 Ironically, when the Catholic St.Martin of Tours persuaded new Emperor Magnus Maximus to use state power to punish the Priscillianists the ‘gulag’ chosen for their exile was the Scilly Islands.29
This situation would doubtless have continued in a surviving Western Empire, at least until the settled socio-economic conditions and probable climactic optimum of the post-Viking era (circa 1100–1300) stimulated the equivalent of the real-life ‘Twelfth-century Renaissance’. Of course, the Western Empire of that era would have been a different social and cultural world to the divided polities of real-life Western Europe. The cultural ‘mix’ of peoples would have been different, with the population upheavals of the fifth to the tenth centuries avoided or much altered and a much more powerful, bureaucratic secular State outmatching the Church in power. No German Holy Roman Emperor ever approached the Roman Emperors in power or the amount of territory controlled, and no Pope could have treated a Roman Emperor as Gregory VII did Henry IV, whose rebellious vassals could be used against him if he did not submit. Individual Emperors like Theodosius did humble themselves before the Church after doing wrong, in that ruler’s case, after carrying out a massacre of his rioting subjects in Thessalonica on dubious evidence. But there would have been no theoretical basis for the submission of secular rulers to Church power ‘per se’, and no Papal legal justification for it on the grounds of a ‘Donation of Constantine’ abdicating secular power in the West.
The Emperors would have continued to appoint and dismiss Popes and, if sufficiently interested, to preside at Church councils. It must however be said that this different balance between secular and religious power would not in itself have led to greater freedom to propose doctrines in defiance of the Creed, or to question the basis of Christian theology. State power had decided what a citizen was required to believe and perform (in public) since the legal orders for all to sacrifice to the pagan gods by Decius in 250–1, though since Constantine the Great (apart from 361–3) the law had been backing Christianity and Theodosius I had banned pagan worship. State police powers were limited, but it would have required an Emperor who was as unusually sceptical about Christianity as Julian to reverse this legal situation. This was however a possibility from a ruler educated in the Latin and Greek classics and enthusiastic for traditional Roman culture; the survival of secular schooling in a continuing Empire would have increased the chance of an earlier than in real life renaissance of interest in the values of the classical world. An Emperor like Frederick II, interested in science and secular learning and at odds with the Church, could then have encouraged both theologically Christian and pagan speculation and refused to continue the draconian legislation imposed by Theodosius I.
One advantage for freedom of thought during an educational revival is that few Roman Emperors were likely to have gone along with any Church plans for an inquisition to root out heretics. The state would have had far more power under the Empire and so been able to back up Church crackdowns across the entire Empire if so agreed, rather than the Pope having to secure the agreement of many separate and mutually hostile secular rulers. There would be no chances of a secular state far from Rome revolting against Papal power and surviving an interdict, but the Papacy would never have achieved the prestige and independence of action that it did in the real-life twelfth century. It would have been the secular power which decided what heresies to persecute and when, as Constantine the Great did regarding the ‘Donatists’ in fourth century Africa, Maximus regarding the Priscillianists and Theodosius I regarding all non-Catholics. The Papacy not Honorius took the lead over Pelagians after 410, but that Emperor was a weak ruler and the state in decline since the 406–12 invasions and civil wars.
A new or weak ruler under political threat might have given in to Church pressure to act against heretics, as Constantine IX in the East was overshadowed by Patriarch Michael Cerularius in the 1050s; but this would have been the exception. Sooner or later, there could logically have been an egotistical and theologically minded Emperor who set out to reform the Church according to his own opinions as Constantine and Justinian had done earlier. Indeed, since Constantine had presided at the Council of Nicaea as the ‘Thirteenth Apostle’ the legal precedents were in favour of the Imperial office’s interventionist role. The clerics would have had no traditions of being able to defy an errant secular authority successfully, provided that that ruler was Christian, unless by luck and good management they had been able to use a successful rebellion or civil war after the fifth century to remove a heretic Emperor.
The landed wealth of the monasteries would have been an added incentive for a financially embarrassed or ambitious secular government to act against them in a mass-confiscation and sale in the manner of Henry VIII. In real life, in the mid-eighth century East the Iconoclast ‘innovator’ Constantine V closed down monasteries as centres of resistance to his doctrines and held forced mass-marriages of monks and nuns. The extent of Im
perial authority over a united Europe, with all its provinces subject to Imperial orders, would however have given pause to a militant reformer such as Luther. No persecuted author could take refuge from Church law and its courts in the domains of a secular ruler who shared his willingness for defiance; the safety of individual controversialists would have depended on local secular connivance and ultimately on Imperial backing. Nor could independent and godly city-states run by reformers, such as sixteenth century Geneva, be set up within an all-embracing Empire. An Emperor loyal to the existing Church order would have had a far easier job than Charles V in the real-life 1520s in putting down heresy and forcing compliance from local authorities.
But, conversely, once an Emperor decided to back the Church’s opponents, as Constantius II and Valens had backed rival sects and Julian the pagans, he could throw the weight of Imperial power into the conflict in support of his protégés. Gaining the support of the secular prince would have been as vital to reform as in sixteenth century England or Scandinavia. Lacking such support, reformers would have had to develop unofficial, underground churches at risk of state harassment as in the fourth century West and East (Arians and Donatists) and the fifth to seventh century East (Nestorians and Monophysites). Such bodies may have been easier to set up in provinces further away from the centres of secular and ecclesiastical power, such as Britain, Scandinavia, and Germany, providing that there were sympathetic local governors or bishops. Many Emperors may indeed have been persuadable that multiplicity of religious belief led to anarchy, as tradition would have been in favour of ‘one Church’ as of one centralised secular government. In these circumstances, it is probable that unless a determined secularising ruler or a classical enthusiast had ended legal coercion an embryonic ‘Protestantism’ may have found it easier to develop in the new colonies in America than in centralised Europe, and Catholicism have maintained its control at the Imperial Court. A form of ‘Counter- Reformationary’ culture and thought would have been likely to emerge at the Imperial court, as in the real-life Habsburg Empire, with Emperors in the mould of Philip II of Spain or Emperors Ferdinand II and III. But hopefully there would have been more open-minded and enquiring rulers in the mould of Rudolf II, and the greater physical survival of classical writings would have duly stimulated a revival of interest in science.
If Rome Hadn't Fallen Page 18