If Rome Hadn't Fallen

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If Rome Hadn't Fallen Page 20

by Timothy Venning


  It is probable that the extra bonus of Western aid could have staved off this disaster to the Empire, which ruined its strength and unity ahead of the Arab attacks, though the piecemeal Slav settlement of the Balkans was more difficult to halt than attacks by Avar armies. Hopefully, though the flight of Roman farmers from the land would have transformed the social and economic basis of the Balkan peninsula, and brought in pagans to replace Christians, major towns within reach of the Black Sea and Aegean coasts could have been held and the decentralized Slavs, small groups of settlers lacking warlords or kings, been brought under Roman military control after the Avars had been vanquished. Their menfolk could then have been recruited to the Roman army and settlers moved to under-populated areas elsewhere in the Empire, as Justinian II carried out after 685 in real life, and the pagan tribes been Christianised once the Church interested itself in missionary work.10

  The lesser strains of a Balkan war in the 590s might have saved Maurice from overthrow in 602, though losses of manpower and financial capacity due to the plague would have been serious even had the West survived. Maurice, apparently loathed in Constantinople and the object of a massive rising by the united circus factions in 602, or his inexperienced young son Theodosius (III?) would still have been at risk of overthrow at some point. To that extent the Empire would have been luckier had the vigorous if spendthrift Tiberius II (who died in 582 in his early fifties) lived longer or had a son, or had Justinian been survived and succeeded by his competent and popular cousin Germanus, who had sons. Once Maurice’s dynasty had fallen, there was an excuse for his old ally King Chosroes II of Persia, who he had restored to the Persian throne in 591, to invade the Empire out of hostility to his usurping successors. In real life, Chosroes used a pretender to the identity of Prince Theodosius, whose death in the bloodbath of November 602 was less certain than that of his younger brothers. The claimant seems to have had some impact in winning over Roman commanders to ally with Persia in the threatened frontier zone of Mesopotamia, as with ‘Domestic of the East’ Narses at Dara in 603, though dislike and fear of the low-born and increasingly bloodthirsty Phocas would have been other factors.

  Arguably, a domestic revolt in Constantinople against Maurice in favour of a more acceptable usurper from the traditional ruling classes, most obviously Theodosius’s father-in-law Germanus, who Maurice accused of treason in 602, or Phocas’ dubious ally Priscus, would have been more likely to command the loyalty of most Eastern army commanders and so kept their command united.11 The Persians would have had less success in breaking through the frontier during Phocas’ reign and thus presenting his replacement Heraclius with disaster in 610: even with the real-life civil wars in the riven Empire, Persia did not gain Dara until 606, Theodosiopolis (the north-eastern frontier key) until 608, and Edessa (key to the upper Euphrates) until 609.12 The nature and beneficiary of the anti-Maurice revolt were thus crucial, but had the Western Empire still been in existence in 602–10 their army would have had the potential to invade at an early stage and remove the usurper. Heraclius, as son and nominee for the throne of the rebelling Exarch of North Africa in Carthage, would have been well placed to use Western aid to reach Constantinople earlier than the real-life autumn 610. The successful invasion of the East by the West had last been carried out in 361 by Julian, though his rival Constantius II had opportunely died before the outcome was decided by battle; Constantine the Great had removed Licinius in 324. Thus Heraclius, or another Western nominee, would have been able to assume the command in the East against Chosroes at an earlier date, and to use Western troops to drive him back.

  It is possible that Chosroes, an ambitious ruler who by the 610s was seemingly intent on reconquering all the Levant lost to Persia in 334–1BC but also potentially open to Persian aristocratic resentment for being installed by Roman armies in 591, would have invaded the Empire opportunistically at any point of domestic crisis. The overthrow of his benefactor Maurice was the real-life excuse, but there could have been others; in 540 his predecessor-but-two and namesake Chosroes Anurshirvan (Immortal Soul) had invaded Syria while Justinian was preoccupied in the West. Assuming that a domestic Eastern crisis after 600 led to a Persian invasion and that a long civil war had enabled Chosroes to take the major Mesopotamian defensive fortresses as in real life, the new Emperor installed securely in Constantinople (Heraclius?) could have called on Western aid to drive back Persia. There is a caveat in that the Empire was hit by plague and famine independently of the civil war in 608–9, thus diminishing its ability to raise troops to fight Persia, but we need not doubt that the civil wars in Syria and Egypt between Phocan loyalists and Heraclian attackers in 608–10 aided the Persians’ success in overrunning this war-ravaged area a few years later.13 Antioch and Caesarea-in-Cappadocia only fell to Chosroes’ generals in around 611, Melitene and Damascus in 613, Palestine in 614 (notoriously aided by a Jewish revolt), and Egypt in 617–19; meanwhile the Persians could raid across Asia Minor to Chalcedon in 614 and in 616 two attacks reached Chalcedon and Sardes.14

  Thus the major disasters in loss of territory only followed Heraclius’ accession, and they were aided by a renewed Avar war in the Balkans; finally in 626 the two powers were able to attack Constantinople together. Had the Eastern Emperors defeated the Avars decisively, hopefully with Western aid, or Heraclius secured the throne with Western aid at an earlier date the Persian attack should have been blunted before it reached this critical stage. The Eastern Empire would have been fighting on one front not two whenever the Persians attacked, and the latter would have been unlikely to have secured Syria or potentially rebellious Palestine let alone Egypt. The main war between Heraclius, probably with Western aid, and the Persians would have centred on the fortresses of the upper Euphrates and Armenia, sites of the previous Roman-Persian wars in the 520s and 570s, or at worst on an invaded Syria and Cappadocia. Crucially, the amount of damage done to crops, towns, and fortresses ahead of the Arab attacks would have been substantially reduced and there is less chance of the collapse of Roman power leading to inter-communal massacres in Palestine. Thus the area would have been able to meet the new challenge from the desert from a stronger position in 634–6, instead of in the aftermath of thirty years of war and over a decade of foreign occupation.

  Assuming a major Persian war to have taken place during an Eastern civil war in Chosroes II’s reign (591–628), the Eastern Emperor, for the sake of argument, Heraclius, could still have lost control of the Euphrates fortresses and faced invasion of Syria. Without the Avar threat as a problem nearer his capital, he would have been able to take the offensive earlier than real-life 626/7. But it is still logical that he would have chosen to invade the Persian heartland via the Caucasus uplands rather than across the Iraqi plains. The Persians and their Parthian predecessors had been able to utilise the latter to harass Roman armies with their hordes of cavalry archers since the disastrous Parthian rout of Crassus at Carrhae in 53BC. The Romans’ nomad Arab ally in Eastern Syria, the Ghassanid confederation, had been destroyed by the pro-Persian Lakhimids recently, so the Emperor could not use their cavalry to protect his army’s flanks against harassment. Quite apart from the uncertain numbers of troops that Chosroes’ generals Shahin and Shahbaraz had at their disposal to oppose a Roman advance, it would have been a wise strategic move for the Emperor to avoid the open plains and march on Chosroes’ capital Ctesiphon via the mountains, and, as in real life, to join up with the new steppe power of the Khazars in the Tbilisi area en route and secure their cavalry. As in real life, the Romans would then have descended on the Iraqi plains from the north (the intended route of Mark Antony in 34 BC) and assaulted Chosroes’ heartland. The speed of the Persian collapse in real-life 627–8 indicates that there was war weariness in their empire as well as in the Roman lands, and it is probable that (as in real life) the humiliated Chosroes would have been deposed and murdered by ambitious relatives and the latter then sued for peace.

  Long-term results in the Middle East, effects on
the Arab invasions?

  The collapse of the war-weakened Persian polity in 628 resulted not only in the evacuation of Roman lands by the undefeated Shahbaraz (who then joined in the competition for the Persian throne) but a prolonged civil war and serious instability. The eventual winner of the conflict, Yazdegerd III, faced Arab invasion in 637 and after losing Iraq, not easy to defend from the Southern desert, as seen by Saddam Hussein in 1991 and 2003, abandoned the fight and fled to the Iranian plateau. Had the area not recently suffered foreign invasion and a prolonged civil war, as with the Roman Levant, Arab occupation would not have been so easy, though the state of the defences of the cities and the morale of their defenders can only be inferred. In the field, the exaggerations of later Arab writers make accurate assessments of Persian numbers impossible. The contemporary Armenian Sebeos put numbers at Qaddisiya at 80,000. One hard-fought battle over several days won all Iraq. Indeed, it is possible that a victorious Eastern Emperor (with Western reinforcements?) could have imposed a treaty on Persia that saw further advances of the Roman frontier from the favourable terms of Maurice’s dictat to the newly-installed Chosroes in 591. The obvious field for Roman expansion was the Caucasus, which had Christian kingdoms in Iberia and Lazica/Abasgia (later to merge in 1000 as Georgia) and the divided Christian land of Armenia. Long torn between Rome and Persia, most of Armenia had passed to Persia in the favourable treaty of 387 and then back to the Empire in 591; the latter treaty had also secured Roman domination of Iberia and a number of valuable fortress-towns in the salient between Euphrates and Tigris (e.g. Nisibis).

  The real-life exhausted Empire of 629 was content with a restoration of the ‘status quo’ on the Persian frontier, but an earlier and more crushing victory, aided by Western troops and possibly by vanquished Avar and Slav ‘federates’ from the Danube, could have secured the Empire full control of all the Caucasus region as far as the vital Darial Pass. This invasion-route was the Khazar highway from their steppe homeland to the Kur valley, where Heraclius met their army in real-life 627, and thence on to attack either Persia or Roman Armenia; its control would be vital for the Empire and could have been secured with extra troops. There were also local Christian ‘Alans’ (Ossetians) available to be used as allies, with titles given to their rulers as was the Roman practice for friendly Caucasian notables. It would not be an innovation for Roman policy to extend their rule or influence this far northeast; it had been considered by both Pompey (who had invaded it in person in the mid-60s BC) and Trajan. Nor was Eastern interest in the 620s a unique result of Heraclius’ situation, Justinian had fought hard to keep the Persians from the Black Sea, the two empires clashing over Iberia and Colchis.

  Given the previous Roman occupation of Iraq by Trajan in 114–17, it is possible that Heraclius would have annexed it from a supine Persia once Chosroes was dead and his heirs fighting over the throne. The Persians were as vulnerable, perhaps more so, to well-armed, large Roman armies as to the small army, perhaps 7,000 strong, of Arab nomads who invaded in 637, if lacking their concentrated archery. Heraclius used propaganda to stress the religious element of his Persian war and inspire zeal, as the Caliphs did. The Romans would not have had to rebuild an occupied and war-shattered Levant in this scenario, though Syria might well have suffered heavily as in the previous Persian invasions of 260 and 540. But loss of men and tax resources to the plague and Balkan wars would make this extension of Roman territory improbable, and it is more likely that Heraclius would have contented himself with backing up his client Shahbaraz as Maurice had previously backed Chosroes. It is arguable that if the experienced Shahbaraz, soon overthrown in real life, had lasted as Great King he would have made a better job of holding back the Arabs in Iraq than Yazdegerd, with no known military experience, did in 637, defeating the lightly-armed invaders once they moved away from the desert to attack the major towns. A Persian ruler who had no dynastic legitimacy was, however, at risk of overthrow by princely pretenders, though Chosroes’ noble rival Bahram Chobin had lasted until removed by Maurice’s armies. It is possible that Shahbaraz and his successors could have held onto the Iranian heartland by building fortresses and defending the passes that crossed the Zagros, at least for a few decades; in real life the plateau was lost in 650. It is unlikely that a Roman Emperor after Heraclius, in real life his consumptive son Constantine III and under-age grandson Constans II, would have had strategic appreciation of the danger of the Arabs wielding Iraqi manpower and Persian military skills against them, the only reason why the Empire might have been willing to lend its troops to a counter-stroke against the Arabs for Persia’s benefit. The Romans in the 640s had no awareness that the Arab conquest was permanent. The new state could have proved as ephemeral as the last successful desert state, the empire of Palmyra whch Aurelian had destroyed in the early 270s.

  Within a few years of 630 the Empire would have faced a rising gradient of Arab incursions into Palestine and Syria, as in real life. This developed independently of the Roman-Persian war, following the Prophet’s uniting of the Arabian Peninsula, as the warlike Arab tribesmen turned their energy from mutual conflict into attacks on their war-weakened nighbours. The consequences for the Empire’s survival of a militarily improved situation in the Levant in the 620s have been covered elsewhere. But the same argument holds as made there, in that no major conflict for the region around 602–29, or an earlier Roman victory would have left fewer towns and fortresses damaged, more troops garrisoning the area, a less ravaged countryside, less mutual antagonism of Jews and Christians in Palestine, and greater will to resist. It would not have prevented military defeats in hostile terrain or bad weather, as at Yarmuk in 636, or the piecemeal undermining of agriculture and isolation of towns by repeated raiding that Roman troops could not prevent. Isolated towns, their trade reduced by insecure roads, could have fallen one by one and farmers have fled the countryside as new settlers took over their lands by force, as the Slavs achieved in the Balkans. But the number of Roman defeats should have been less, and towns, not taken by the Persians, so with undamaged walls, should have held out longer, except when struck by earthquakes.15

  It is worth noting that in war-ravaged Italy after 568 the persistent but small and poorly-armed Lombard incursions only gradually overran the isolated towns, and failed to conquer the Southern coastal towns or fortified Rome and marsh-bound Ravenna. Inland, the countryside could be overrun and isolated towns surrounded and starved-out. Could the Arab armies have had a similarly limited effect at first in Syria and Palestine had they faced stronger resistance and the Caliphs diverted their main efforts against the weaker Persia?

  Coastal towns should have held out longest as they could be supplied by sea, at least until the Arabs had acquired siege-machinery from Persia; in the thirteenth century the well-defended coastal towns of Palestine and Syria defied the inland Moslem powers for decades. The maximum danger would have come had walls been levelled by earthquakes. Logically, the availability of troops from the Western Empire to assist the Eastern army should have made the latter more formidable, and reinforced their garrisons’ ability to hold out. The one caveat to this is that a Catholic Western Emperor might have take issue with Heraclius or Constans II over their heretical proposals to reunite Nicaen orthodoxy with Monophysitism by a new theological dogma, and thus broken off the supply of military aid for several crucial decades from around 640.

  Inland Syria and Palestine were difficult to defend from the desert, although a stronger and well-funded Eastern army should have been able to defeat most lightly-armed Arab armies until the latter had superiority of numbers from the conquest of Iraq and the Iranian plateaus. The threat of Arab archery to Roman infantry or cavalry, as from the Parthians at Carrhae and of inclement weather or incompetent generalship would have aided the Arabs. Roman fear of encounters with their Middle Eastern enemies in the open plains was more noticeable at times of military inferiority. Trajan in the 110s, Lucius Verus in the 160s, Septimius Severus in 197–8, Carus in 283, and Julian
in 363 all tackled the open plains of Iraq and the Persians chose to retreat before them. Possibly a major defeat like Yarmuk would have made them as wary of the Arabs as they had been of Persia in the plains in the 620s, or poor leadership after Heraclius died undermined a coherent resistance and led to piecemeal conquest of the Levant. But the Romans had held onto well-fortified Antioch against Parthian attack after Carrhae in the late 50s BC, thanks to decisive leadership by Cassius, later Caesar’s murderer, and superior defensive capability. Could the will to resist and more troops have saved Antioch again in the 640s?

  With regular military assistance from the West, not available to the heretic Constans, in real life in conflict with the Papacy, the local outposts of the Eastern Empire could have held out for several more decades, at least on the coast. A fortified ‘limes’ across the line of the Isthmus of Suez and ships, aided by the allied Christian power of Axum, which had had the naval power to hold the Yemen in recent decades, in the Red Sea, could have preserved Egypt for several decades, until the Arabs managed to infiltrate the local deserts and join up with local tribesmen around the Nile valley. It is quite conceivable that the Romans could have halted the Arab advance westwards at the Red Sea or the ‘narrows’ of Tripolitania and preserved most of North Africa for Christianity, at least until some civil war gave the invaders their chance. Western troops from Europe would have aided the resistance around Carthage, though if the Arabs had managed to convert the desert tribes the always latent threat of Berber raids could then have made the province economically unviable and led to eventual evacuation. The limited archaeological evidence in Tunisia for the seventh century shows poor agriculture and declining towns (aided by Berber raids?), so resistance would need outside help.

 

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