The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
Page 10
The pendulum had swung both ways during intense fighting over the previous two decades. It looked to all intents and purposes as if Rome had secured a great diplomatic and political coup. Now that it had the forward bases that had previously been lacking, it finally had the chance to establish a permanent presence in the Near East. As the historian Procopius recognised, the plains of Mesopotamia that fanned out across the massive basin of the Tigris and Euphrates provided few obvious frontier points in the form of rivers, lakes or mountains.21 This meant any gains made were vulnerable unless a giant swathe of territory could be annexed and held. Khusraw II may have regained the throne, but it came at a high price.
And yet barely a decade later the tables turned spectacularly. When Emperor Maurice was murdered by Phokas, one of his generals, in a palace coup in 602, Khusraw II seized the moment to strike and force a renegotiation. He gained confidence after a fierce attack on Dara knocked out a vital point in the Roman defensive system in northern Mesopotamia and again from Phokas’ struggle to impose authority at home. When reports came that a new wave of nomad attacks was ravaging the Balkans, the Shah raised his ambitions. The traditional client-management system that was used to govern the subject peoples of northern Arabia was hastily dismantled in anticipation of a major reorganisation of the frontier that would follow Persian expansion.22
The Christian population was handled carefully. Bishops had learnt from experience to fear the prospect of war, since hostilities with the Romans were often accompanied by accusations of collaboration. The Shah personally presided over the election of a new patriarch in 605, inviting the senior clergy to meet and choose a new incumbent. This was a deliberate signal to provide reassurance and to show the minority population that their ruler was sympathetic to their affairs. It was an effective move, interpreted by the Christian community as a sign of benevolent protection: Khusraw was effusively thanked by the bishops, who gathered together to praise ‘the powerful, generous, kind and bounteous King of Kings’.23
With the Roman Empire buckling under one internal revolt after another, Persian forces turned the screw: cities in Mesopotamia fell like dominoes, with Edessa the last capitulating in 609. Attention then turned to Syria. Antioch, the great city on the Orontes, first See of St Peter and the major metropolis of Roman Syria, fell in 610, followed by Emesa in western Syria the following year. With the fall of Damascus in 613, another great regional centre was lost.
Things only got worse. In Constantinople, the unpopular and hubristic Phokas was murdered, his naked and dismembered remains paraded through the city’s streets. The new Emperor, Heraclius, however, proved no more effective in halting the Persians, whose advances had by now acquired a devastating momentum. After defeating a Roman counter-attack in Asia Minor, the Shah’s armies turned south to Jerusalem. The aim was obvious: to capture the most holy city in Christendom and, in doing so, to assert the cultural and religious triumph of Persia.
When the city fell after a short siege, in May 614, the reaction in the Roman world bordered on hysteria. The Jews were accused not just of collaborating with the Persians but of actively supporting them. According to one source, the Jews were ‘like evil beasts’, helping the invading army – themselves compared to ferocious animals and hissing snakes. They were accused of playing an active role in massacring the local population who piously rejoiced as they died ‘because they were being slain for Christ’s sake and shed their blood for His blood’. Stories spread that churches were being pulled down, crosses trampled underfoot and icons spat on. The True Cross on which Jesus was crucified was captured and sent back to the Persian capital as a trophy of war par excellence for Khusraw. This was a truly disastrous turn of events for Rome, and one that the Emperor’s propagandists immediately turned their attention to in an attempt to limit the damage.24
Faced with such setbacks, Heraclius considered abdicating, before deciding to take desperate measures: ambassadors were sent to Khusraw to seek peace on any terms. Through the envoys, Heraclius begged for forgiveness and blamed his predecessor, Phokas, for Rome’s recent acts of aggression. Presenting himself as a submissive inferior, the Roman ruler hailed the Shah as ‘supreme Emperor’. Khusraw listened carefully to what the envoys had to say; then he had them executed.25
When news filtered back, panic gripped Constantinople, enabling radical reforms to be pushed through with barely a flicker of opposition. The salaries of the empire’s officials were halved, as was the pay of the military. The free distribution of bread, a long-standing political tool to win the goodwill of the capital’s inhabitants, was stopped.26 Precious metals were seized from churches in a frantic effort to boost the exchequer. In order to underline the scale of the battle ahead and atone for the sins that had led God to chastise and punish the Romans, Heraclius modified the design of the coinage. While the bust of the Emperor on the obverse remained the same, on the reverse of new coins, minted in large volumes and in new denominations, was the image of a cross set on steps: the fight against the Persians was nothing less than the fight to defend the Christian faith.27
In the short term, these measures achieved little. After securing Palestine, the Persians turned to the Nile delta, taking Alexandria in 619.28 In less than two years, Egypt – the breadbasket of the Mediterranean and bedrock of the Roman agrarian economy for six centuries – fell. Next came Asia Minor, which was attacked in 622. Although the advance was checked for a time, by 626 the Persian army was camped within sight of the walls of Constantinople. As if that were not bad enough for the Romans, the Shah made an alliance with the Avar nomads who had overrun the Balkans and had marched on the city from the north. All that now separated the remnants of imperial Rome from complete annihilation was the thickness of the walls of the city of the great Constantine – Constantinople, New Rome. The end was nigh; and it seemed utterly inevitable.
Chance though was on Heraclius’ side. Initial efforts to take the city failed, and subsequent assaults were beaten away with ease. The enemies’ commitment began to sag, failing first among the Avars. Having struggled to pasture their horses, the nomads withdrew when tribal differences threatened to undermine their leader’s authority. The Persians pulled back soon afterwards too, in part because of reports of Türk attacks in the Caucasus that required attention: impressive territorial expansion had overstretched resources, leaving newly conquered lands dangerously exposed – and the Türks knew it. Constantinople had been spared by the skin of its teeth.29
In an astonishing counter-attack, Heraclius, who had been leading the imperial army in Asia Minor during the siege of his capital, now tore after the retreating enemy. The Emperor first made for the Caucasus, where he met the Türk Khagan and agreed an alliance – showering him with honours and gifts, and offering him his daughter, Eudokia, as a bride to formalise ties of friendship.30 The Emperor then threw caution to the wind and moved south, crushing a large Persian army near Nineveh (in what is now northern Iraq) in the autumn of 627, before advancing on Ctesiphon as opposition melted away.
The Persian leadership creaked under the pressure. Khusraw was murdered, while his son and successor, Kavad, appealed to Heraclius for an immediate settlement.31 The Emperor was satisfied by the promise of territory and kudos and withdrew to Constantinople, leaving his ambassador to agree terms, which included the return of Roman territory that had been seized during the wars – and also the return of the parts of the True Cross that had been taken from Jerusalem in 614.32 It marked a spectacular and crushing victory for the Romans.
This was not the end of it, however, for a storm was brewing which was to bring Persia to the brink of collapse. The senior general in the field, Shahrbarāz, who had masterminded the recent lightning assault on Egypt, reacted to the reversal of fortune by mounting a bid for the throne. With Persian fortunes at a low ebb and with the frontier in the east vulnerable to opportunistic attacks by Türk raiders, the case for a man of action seemed irresistible. As the coup gathered pace, the general negotiated directly wit
h Heraclius to gain Roman support for his uprising, withdrawing from Egypt and moving on Ctesiphon with the Emperor’s support.
With the situation in Persia unravelling, Heraclius celebrated with gusto the astonishing reversal of fortune to cement his popularity. He had played heavily on religion to build support and stiffen resolve during the empire’s dark hours. Khusraw’s attack had been explained as a direct assault on Christianity, something underlined emphatically in a piece of theatre enacted before the imperial troops, in which a letter was read out that appeared to be written in the Shah’s own hand: it not only personally ridiculed Heraclius, but scoffed at the powerlessness of the Christians’ God.33 The Romans had been challenged to fight for what they believed in: this had been a war of religion.
Perhaps not surprisingly, then, Roman triumphalism produced ugly scenes. After Heraclius had led a ceremonial entry into Jerusalem in March 630 and restored the fragments of the True Cross to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jews were supposedly baptised by force, as punishment for the role they were thought to have played in the fall of the city sixteen years earlier; those who fled were banned from coming within three miles of Jerusalem.34 Eastern Christians whose beliefs were judged to be non-conformist were targeted too by imperial agents, being obliged to abandon long-standing doctrinal positions and coerced into accepting the teachings of streamlined Orthodox Christianity that now claimed to have powerful evidence that it alone truly enjoyed God’s blessing.35
This was problematic for the church in Persia, which had not seen eye to eye with its western peer for more than a century and whose senior clergy increasingly saw themselves as the transmitters of the true faith – in contrast to the church in the west which had been systemically corrupted by deviant teachings. As the bishops of Persia put it when they met in 612, all major heresies had sprung up in the Roman Empire – unlike in Persia, where ‘no heresy has ever arisen’.36 So when Heraclius ‘restored the church to the orthodox’ in Edessa and gave instructions to drive out the eastern Christians who had worshipped there in the past, it looked as though his plan was to convert all of Persia – an idea Heraclius seems to have been actively pondering since the dramatic turn of fortune. And it was to be converted into Roman, western Christianity.37
The resurgent, dominant religion championed by Constantinople had swept all before it. The extraordinary sequence of events had left a host of old ideas in tatters. When plague broke out in Ctesiphon, claiming Shah Kavad as a victim, it seemed obvious that Zoroastrianism was little more than wishful thinking: Christianity was the true faith, and its followers had been rewarded.38 In this highly charged atmosphere, a new rumbling could be heard. It came from the south, from deep inside the Arabian peninsula. This region had been all but untouched by the recent fighting between the Romans and Persians, but that did not mean that it was unaffected by the monumental clashes taking place hundreds of miles away. In fact, the south-west of the heel of Arabia had long been a crucible for confrontation between the two empires, where less than a century earlier the kingdom of imyar and the cities of Mecca and Medina had thrown in their lot with Persia against a Christian coalition of forces from Constantinople and imyar’s deadly Red Sea rival, Ethiopia.39
This was a region where beliefs had been changing, adapting and competing with each other for the best part of a century. What had been a polytheist world of multiple deities, idols and beliefs had given way to monotheism and to ideas about a single, all-powerful deity. Sanctuaries dedicated to multiple gods were becoming so marginalised that one historian has stated that on the eve of the rise of Islam traditional polytheism ‘was dying’. In its place came Jewish and Christian concepts of a single, all-powerful God – as well as of angels, paradise, prayer and alms-giving which can be found in inscriptions that begin to proliferate across the Arabian peninsula in the late sixth and early seventh centuries.40
It was in this region, as war raged to the north, that a trader named Muammad, a member of the Banū Hāshim clan of the Quraysh tribe, retreated to a cave not far from the city of Mecca to contemplate. According to the Islamic tradition, in 610 he began to receive a series of revelations from God. Muammad heard a voice that commanded him to recite verses ‘in the name of your Lord!’41 Panicked and confused, he left the cave, but saw a man ‘feet astride the horizon’, and a voice that boomed at him: ‘O Muammad, thou art the prophet of God and I am Jibrīl.’42 A series of recitations followed over the coming years that were first written down around the middle of the seventh century in a single text – known as the Qurān.43
God sends apostles, Muammad was told by the angel Jibrīl (or Gabriel), to deliver good news or to give warnings.44 Muammad had been chosen as a messenger by the Almighty. There was much darkness in the world, he was told, many things to fear, and the danger of apocalypse at every corner. Recite the divine messages, he was urged, for when you do so you ‘seek refuge in [Allah] from accursed Satan: no power has he over those who believe and put their trust in their Lord.’45 God is compassionate and merciful, Muammad was repeatedly told, but He is also severe in his punishment for those who refuse to obey him.46
The sources relating to the early Islamic period are complex and pose serious problems of interpretation.47 Establishing how contemporary and later political motivations shaped the story of Muammad and the messages he received is not easy – and, what is more, is a matter of intense debate among modern scholars. It is difficult, for example, to understand clearly what role belief played in shaping attitudes and events, not least since distinctions were made as early as the middle of the seventh century between believers (mu’minūn) and those who joined them and submitted to their authority (muslimūn). Later writers focused closely on the role of religion and emphasised not only the power of spiritual revelation but also the solidarity of the Arabs who effected revolution – with the result that it is as unsatisfactory to talk of the conquests of the period as ‘Muslim’ as it is to refer to them as ‘Arab’. Moreover, identities not only shifted after this period, but during it too – and of course we are reliant on the eyes of the beholders for such labels in the first place.
Nevertheless, although even establishing a secure sequence of events can be problematic, there is a wide acceptance that Muammad was not the only figure in the Arabian peninsula in the early seventh century to talk about a single God, for there were other ‘copycat prophets’ who rose to prominence in precisely the period of the Perso-Roman wars. The most notable offered messianic and prophetic visions that were strikingly similar to those of Muammad – promising revelations from the angel Gabriel, pointing to paths to salvation and in some cases offering holy writings to back their claims up.48 It was a time when Christian churches and shrines were starting to appear in and around Mecca, as is clear from the archaeological record, which also bears witness to icons and cemeteries of the new converted populations. Competition for hearts, minds and souls was fierce in this region in this period.49
There is also growing consensus that Muammad was preaching to a society that was experiencing acute economic contraction as a result of the Perso-Roman Wars.50 The confrontation and the effective militarisation of Rome and Persia had an important impact on trade originating in or passing through the ijāz. With government expenditure funnelled into the army and chronic pressure on the domestic economies to support the war effort, demand for luxury items must have fallen considerably. The fact that the traditional markets, above all the cities in the Levant and in Persia, were caught up in the fighting can only have further depressed the economy of southern Arabia.51
Few would have felt the pinch more than the Quraysh of Mecca, whose caravans carrying gold and other valuables to Syria had been the stuff of legend. They also lost their lucrative contract to supply the Roman army with the leather needed for saddles, strapping for boots and shields, belts and more besides.52 Their livelihood too may have been further threatened by a decline in pilgrims visiting the haram, an important shrine dedicated to pagan gods located in Mecca. T
he site was centred on a series of idols – reportedly including one ‘of Abraham as an old man’ – but the most important of which was a red agate statue of a man with a golden right hand and with seven divinatory arrows around it.53 As guardians of Mecca, the Quraysh did well from selling food and water to visitors and performing rituals for pilgrims. With upheaval in Syria and Mesopotamia having repercussions further beyond, and disruption in so many different aspects of daily life, it was not surprising that Muammad’s warnings of imminent doomsday struck a powerful chord.
Muammad’s preaching certainly fell on fertile ground. He was offering a bold and coherent explanation for traumatic levels of upheaval with immense passion and conviction. Not only were the epiphanies he had received powerful, so too were the warnings he issued. Those who followed his teaching would find that their land would be fruitful and burst with grain; those who did not would see their crops fail.54 Spiritual salvation would bring economic rewards. There was much to gain: believers would behold nothing less than Paradise, where gardens were fed by fresh and pure water, by ‘rivers of wine delectable to those that drink it, and rivers of clarified honey’. The faithful would be rewarded with every kind of fruit, and would receive the Lord’s forgiveness at the same time.55
Those who rejected the divine doctrines would face not just doom and disaster but damnation: anyone who waged war on his followers would suffer terribly and receive no mercy. They were to be executed or crucified, lose limbs or be exiled: the enemies of Muammad were the enemies of God; truly they would suffer an awful fate.56 This would include having skin burnt off by fire, to be replaced by fresh skin that would suffer the same fate, so the pain and torture would be never ending.57 Those who did not believe would ‘abide in Hell for ever, and drink scalding water that will tear their bowels to pieces’.58