In the 330s, rumour spread that Constantine was preparing an attack on Persia, exploiting an opening presented by a disaffected brother of the Shah who had sought sanctuary at the Roman imperial court. Persian nerves must have jangled when a letter was received from Constantine announcing that he was delighted to have learnt that ‘the finest provinces of Persia are filled with those men on whose behalf alone I am at present speaking; I mean the Christians’. He had a specific message for the Persian ruler Shāpūr II: ‘I commend these persons to you for your protection . . . cherish them with your customary humanity and kindness; for by this proof of faith you will secure an immeasurable benefit both to yourself and us.’66 This might have been meant as gentle advice, but it sounded like a threat: not long beforehand, Rome had rolled its eastern frontier deep into Persian territory, and immediately set about a programme of fortification and road-building to secure these gains.67
When the ruler of Georgia, another Caucasian kingdom of commercial and strategic value, experienced an epiphany that was only marginally less colourful than Constantine’s (the king literally saw the light after being engulfed by darkness while hunting), anxiety turned to panic.68 With Constantine absent on the Danube frontier, Shāpūr II launched a surprise attack into the Caucasus, deposing one of the local rulers and installing his own nominee in his place. Constantine responded immediately and dramatically: he assembled an enormous army and, ordering his bishops to accompany the forthcoming expedition, arranged for a replica to be made of the Tabernacle, the structure used to house the Ark of the Covenant. He then announced that he wished to undertake a punitive attack on Persia and be baptised in the River Jordan.69
The scale of Constantine’s ambition knew no bounds. He minted coins in advance, giving his half-nephew a new royal title: ruler of Persia.70 Excitement spread quickly among Christians in the east, captured in a letter written by Aphrahat, head of an important monastery near Mosul: ‘Goodness has come to the people of God.’ This was the moment that he had been waiting for: Christ’s kingdom on earth was about to be established once and for all. ‘Be certain,’ he concluded, ‘the beast will be killed at its preordained time.’71
As the Persians prepared to mount fierce resistance, they had a huge stroke of luck: before the expedition could get going, Constantine fell ill and died. Shāpūr II proceeded to unleash hell on the local Christian population in Persia as a reprisal for Constantine’s aggression. Egged on by the Zoroastrian authorities, the Shah ‘thirsted for the blood of the saints’.72 Martyrs were made by the dozen: one manuscript from Edessa at the start of the fifth century records the execution of no fewer than sixteen bishops as well as fifty priests in this period.73 Christians were now regarded as an advance guard, a fifth column that would open Persia to the Roman Empire in the west. Leading bishops were accused of making the Shah’s ‘followers and people rebel against [his] Majesty and become slaves of the emperor who shares their faith’.74
This bloodbath was a direct result of the enthusiastic adoption of Christianity in Rome. The persecutions unleashed by the Shah stemmed from the fact that Constantine had elided the promotion of the Roman Empire with that of Christianity. The Emperor’s grand statements may have impressed and inspired men like Aphrahat, but they were immensely challenging for the leadership in Persia. Roman identity had been clear-cut before Constantine’s conversion. But now the Emperor – and his successors – was willing to talk of protecting not only Rome and its citizens, but Christians in general too. It was a convenient ace to play, not least at home where the rhetoric was bound to go down well with bishops and the faithful. For those living beyond the empire’s borders, however, it was potentially disastrous – as Shāpūr’s victims found.
It is ironic, therefore, that while Constantine is famous for being the Emperor who laid the basis for the Christianisation of Europe, it is never noted that there was a price to pay for his embrace of a new faith: it spectacularly compromised Christianity’s future in the east. The question was whether the teachings of Jesus Christ that had taken hold deep in Asia would be able to survive a determined challenge.
3
The Road to a Christian East
In due course, tensions between Rome and Persia abated, and as they did so, attitudes to religion softened. This came about because Rome was forced into retreat so firmly in the fourth century that it found itself fighting for its very life. In a series of campaigns that lasted until Shāpūr II’s death in 379, Persia succeeded in taking key nodes along the trade and communication routes running towards the Mediterranean. Nisibis and Sinagra were recovered, and half of Armenia was annexed. Although this territorial rebalancing helped calm animosities, relations really improved when both Rome and Persia were faced with new challenges: disaster was looming from the steppes.
The world was entering a period of environmental change. In Europe, this was evidenced by rising sea levels and the emergence of malaria in the North Sea region, while in Asia from the start of the fourth century sharply reduced salinity in the Aral Sea, markedly different vegetation on the steppes (evident from high-resolution pollen analyses) and new patterns of glacier advances in the Tian Shan range all show fundamental shifts in global climatic change.1
The results were devastating, attested by a remarkable letter written by a Sogdian trader in the early fourth century and found not far from Dunhuang in western China. The merchant recounted to his fellow traders that food shortages and famine had taken a heavy toll, that such catastrophe had befallen China as to be barely describable. The Emperor had fled from the capital, setting fire to his palace as he left, while the Sogdian merchant communities were gone, wiped out by starvation and death. Do not bother trying to trade there, the author advised: ‘there is no profit for you to gain from it’. He told of city after city being sacked. The situation was apocalyptic.2
The chaos created the perfect conditions for the mosaic of steppes tribes to consolidate. These peoples inhabited the belts of land linking Mongolia with the plains of central Europe, where control of the best grazing land and of reliable water supply guaranteed considerable political power. One tribe now established themselves as masters on the steppes, crushing all before them. The Sogdian trader referred to the architects of apocalypse in his letter as the xwn. They were the Xiongnu – better known in the west as the Huns.3
Between about 350 and 360 there was a huge wave of migration as tribes were shunted off their lands and driven westwards. This was most likely caused by climate change, which made life on the steppe exceptionally harsh and triggered intense competition for resources. The impact was felt from Bactria in northern Afghanistan right up to the Roman frontier on the Danube, where refugees began to appear in large numbers, begging to be allowed to resettle on imperial territory after being driven off their lands north of the Black Sea by the advancing Huns. The situation quickly became dangerously unstable. A massive Roman army sent to restore order was heavily defeated by the Huns on the flat plains of Thrace in 378, with the Emperor Valens among the many casualties.4 The defences burst open, and tribe after tribe poured through into the empire’s western provinces, threatening Rome as a result. Previously, the northern lip of the Black Sea and the steppe lands stretching deep into Asia had been regarded as implacably barbarous, filled with fierce warriors and empty of civilisation or resources. It had not crossed Rome’s mind that these regions could act as arteries, just like the routes linking the west with the east through Persia and through Egypt. These very regions were now about to deliver death and destruction into the very heart of Europe.
Persia was also quaking in the face of cataclysm from the steppes. Its provinces in the east buckled under the onslaught, before collapsing altogether: towns were depopulated; crucial irrigation networks fell into disrepair and broke down as raids took their toll.5 Attacks through the Caucasus were overwhelming, and resulted in prisoners and booty being seized from the cities of Mesopotamia, Syria and Asia Minor. Then in 395 a major long-range attack devastated the
cities of the Tigris and Euphrates, reaching as far as Ctesiphon, the capital, before finally being driven back.6
United by a common interest in repelling the barbarian hordes, Persia and Rome now formed a remarkable alliance. To keep the nomads from descending through the Caucasus, a massive fortified wall was constructed, running for nearly 125 miles between the Caspian and Black Seas, protecting the Persian interior from attack and serving as a physical barrier between the ordered world to the south and the chaos to the north. Studded with thirty forts evenly spaced along its length, the wall was also protected by a canal fifteen feet deep. It was a marvel of architectural planning and engineering, built with standardised bricks made in scores of kilns installed on site. The fortification was manned by some 30,000 troops, housed in garrisons that were set back from the wall itself.7 The barrier was just one of several innovative steps taken by the Sasanians to defend Persia’s long northern frontier with the steppe, and to protect vulnerable trading posts such as Merv, which was the first location that would be encountered by attackers coming through the Karakum desert (in what is now Turkmenistan).8
Rome not only agreed to make regular financial contributions to the maintenance of this Persian wall, but also, according to several contemporary sources, supplied soldiers to help defend it.9 In a sign of how past rivalries had been set to one side, in 402 the Emperor Honorius in Constantinople appointed none other than the Shah to act as guardian to his son and heir.10
But by that time it was too late – as far as Rome was concerned. Displacement across the steppes north of the Black Sea had created a perfect storm that led to the empire’s frontiers on the Rhine being overwhelmed. A series of raids in the late fourth century cleaved Rome’s western provinces wide open, with tribal leaders gaining personal kudos from military successes as well as material gains that drew in more followers and gave fresh momentum to further attacks. As the imperial army struggled to make a stand against the attacking hordes, one wave after another crashed through the empire’s defences, leading to the devastation of the province of Gaul. Things went from bad to worse when Alaric, a particularly effective and ambitious leader, marched his tribe of Visigoths down through Italy and camped outside Rome to bully the city into buying him off. As the Senate desperately tried to do so, he grew tired of being stalled, and in 410 stormed and sacked the city.11
Shock resonated across the Mediterranean. In Jerusalem, the news was met with disbelief. ‘The speaker’s voice failed, and sobs interrupted his speech,’ wrote St Jerome, ‘the city that had conquered the whole world had itself been conquered . . . who could believe it? Who could believe that Rome, built up through the ages by the conquest of the world, had fallen, that the mother of nations had become their tomb?’12 At least the city was not torched, wrote the historian Jordanes with the weary resignation of a century’s hindsight.13
Burning or not, Rome’s empire in the west now fell apart. Soon Spain was being ravaged, attacked by tribes such as the Alans, whose homelands lay far away between the Caspian and Black Seas, and whose trade in sable skins had first been carefully charted by commentators writing in China nearly two centuries earlier.14 Another tribal grouping, the Vandals, who had been displaced by the Huns, reached Roman North Africa by the 420s, taking control of the principal city, Carthage, as well as the vibrant and lucrative surrounding provinces that supplied most of the western half of the empire with corn.15
As if this were not bad enough, in the middle of the fifth century, having flushed forward a hotch-potch of tribes – Terevingian Goths, Alans, Vandals, Suevi, Gepids, Neurians, Bastarnians and others besides – the Huns themselves appeared in Europe, led by the most famous figure of late antiquity: Attila.16 The Huns caused pure terror. They are ‘the seedbed of evil’, wrote one Roman writer, and ‘exceedingly savage’. Trained from youth to cope with extreme cold, hunger and thirst, they dressed in the skins of field mice that were stitched together; they would eat roots and raw flesh – which would be partially warmed by being placed between their thighs.17 They had no interest in agriculture, noted another, and only wanted to steal from their neighbours, enslaving them in the process: they were like wolves.18 The Huns scarred the cheeks of infant boys when they were born in order to prevent facial hair growing later in life, while they spent so long on horseback that their bodies were grotesquely deformed; they looked like animals standing on their hind legs.19
Although it is tempting to dismiss such comments as signs of bigotry, examinations of skeletal remains show that the Huns practised artificial cranial deformation on their young, bandaging the skull to flatten the frontal and occipital bones by applying pressure to them. This caused the head to grow in a distinctly pointed manner. It was not just the behaviour of the Huns that was terrifyingly out of the ordinary; so was the way they looked.20
The arrival of the Huns spelt serious danger for the eastern half of the Roman Empire, which had thus far been relatively unscathed by the upheavals that devastated much of Europe. The provinces of Asia Minor, Syria and Palestine and Egypt were still intact, as was the magnificent city of Constantinople. Taking no chances, the Emperor Theodosius II surrounded the city with formidable defences, including a huge set of Land Walls, to protect it from attack.
These walls, and the narrow strip of water separating Europe from Asia, proved to be crucial. After setting himself up just to the north of the Danube, Attila ravaged the Balkans for fifteen years, extracting heavy tribute from the government in Constantinople in return for not advancing further, and securing vast amounts of gold. Having squeezed everything he could from the imperial authorities in terms of ransoms and bribes, he advanced west; eventually his progress was checked, not by the armies of Rome, but by a coalition made up of many long-term enemies of the Huns. At the battle of the Catalaunian Plains, in what is now central France, in 451, Attila was defeated by a large force that included an astonishing array of races drawn from the peoples of the steppes. The Hun leader died not long afterwards on his wedding night – not his first. Celebrating excessively, says one contemporary, he ‘lay down on his back sodden with wine and sleep’, suffered a brain haemorrhage and died in his sleep. ‘Thus drunkenness brought a shameful end to a king who had won glory in war.’21
These days, it is voguish to talk of an age of transformation and continuities that followed the sack of Rome – rather than to describe the period as the Dark Ages. And yet, as one modern scholar argues powerfully, the impact of the rape, pillage and anarchy that marked the fifth century as the Goths, Alans, Vandals and Huns rampaged across Europe and North Africa is hard to exaggerate. Literacy levels plummeted; building in stone all but disappeared, a clear sign of collapse of wealth and ambition; long-distance trade that once took pottery from factories in Tunisia as far as Iona in Scotland collapsed, replaced by local markets dealing only with exchange of petty goods; and as measured from pollution in polar ice-caps in Greenland there was a major contraction in smelting work, with levels falling back to those of prehistoric times.22
Contemporaries struggled to make sense of what, to them, was the complete collapse of the world order. ‘Why does [God] allow us to be weaker and more miserable’ than all these tribal peoples, wailed the fifth-century Christian writer Salvian; ‘why has he allowed us to be conquered by the barbarians? Why does he permit us to be subject to the rule of our enemies?’ The answer, he concluded, was simple: men had sinned and God was punishing them.23 Others reached the opposite conclusion. Rome had been master of the world when it was faithful to its pagan roots, argued Zosimus, the Byzantine historian (who was himself pagan); when it abandoned these and turned to a new faith, it engineered its own demise. This, he said, was not an opinion; it was a fact.24
Rome’s collapse took the sting out of Christianity in Asia. Relations with Persia had improved in the face of their mutual interests in resisting the peoples of the steppe, and with the empire deeply enfeebled Christianity no longer looked as threatening – or perhaps even as convincing – as it had a c
entury earlier, when Constantine was gearing up to attack Persia and liberate its Christian population. In 410, therefore, the first of several meetings took place, prompted by the Shah, Yazdagird I, to formalise the position of the Christian church in Persia and to standardise its beliefs.
As in the west, many divergent views had sprung up about what following Jesus meant precisely, about how believers should live and how they should manifest and practise their faith. As noted earlier, even Kirdīr’s inscription from the third century spoke of two types of Christians, nasraye and kristyone – normally understood as differentiating between locals who had been evangelised and those who had been deported from Roman territory. Variation in practices and doctrine was a constant source of problems, perhaps not surprisingly given that in places like Rev-Ardashīr in Fars, in southern Iran, there were two churches, one conducting services in Greek, the other in Syriac. Rivalry sometimes prompted physical violence, such as in the city of Susiana (in what is now south-western Iran) where rival bishops tried to settle scores over a fist-fight.25 Efforts by the bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, one of the Persian Empire’s most important cities, to bring order and unity to all Christian communities proved frustrating and ineffective.26
With the possibility of salvation depending on getting questions of faith right, it was important to iron out differences once and for all – something the early church fathers had been at pains to stress since the very start.27 ‘I now repeat what I have said before,’ St Paul reminded the Galatians; ‘if anyone preaches a gospel at variance with the gospel which you have received, let him be outcast!’ (Gal. 1:9). It was in this context that texts were written to evangelise – literally, ‘to give the good news’ – in order to explain who the Son of God was and what his precise message had been, and to systematise beliefs.28
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World Page 7