Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World

by David Keys

  Equally significant for subsequent European history were the repercussions that flowed from the tragic destruction of the Gepids. The Avars were not, in economic or social terms, the same as the Slav and other European barbarian peoples whose territories they invaded. They were nomad warrior pastoralists with experience of and an aptitude for empire building. They became a ruthless ruling elite—and where their swords cleared the way, their subject peoples, mainly Slavs, flowed in. Some of what had been Gepid land became populated by Slavs, and in the late 560s and 570s, under Avar encouragement, protection, and pressure, the Slavs moved into Moravia, Bohemia, and Germany as far west as the river Elbe.

  Although the Avars themselves have long vanished into the mists of history, it is to them that the modern world owes much of the ethnic and political geography of modern eastern Europe. They were, to a large extent, a violent and catalytic phenomenon—a sort of bulldozer that often forced those in front to move on (to become someone else’s tormentors) and enabled those to its rear to benefit as allied subject colonists of new lands.

  The Avars’ objective was to operate a massive protection racket of sorts. The Roman Empire was to be their milk cow, and (from c. 580 onward) the Slavs were to be the major instrument through which the racket would be made to work.

  This heist went on for almost fifty years and netted the Avars at least seventy thousand pounds of gold (equivalent to around $11 billion in modern terms). It began in 572 when the Avars forced the Romans to start paying 80,000 gold solidi per year in so-called peace payments. Three years previously, the Avars had launched an unsuccessful attack on the Roman city of Sirmium (Sremska Mitrovica in modern Serbia), but in 571 the future emperor Tiberius had been defeated in an important battle in what is now northern Serbia, and the following year the Avars began demanding these payments in exchange for not invading the empire.

  But in 578 the Avars were on the offensive once more, and again Sirmium was their target. If they were to extract an increased amount of gold from the Romans, it was essential that the strategically vital city be snatched from Roman control, for whoever controlled Sirmium controlled the route between the western and eastern parts of the empire. Roman control meant that Avar military use of the vital river Sava could be blocked or at least controlled and that Roman forces could use Sirmium as a base for penetrating Avar territory north of the river.

  So it was that in 578 the Avars, under their ruler, the all-powerful kagan Baian, started one of the great sieges in European history. First, using captured Roman engineers, they cut the city off from the rest of the world by building two pontoon bridges across the river—one upstream of Sirmium, the other downstream. With the river firmly in Avar hands, an imperial relief expedition failed to break through. After two years of siege, the city was racked by starvation and disease. The desperate plight of its people was symbolized by a piece of graffiti found by archaeologists 1,300 years later. An unknown citizen had scrawled a message to God and posterity in ungrammatical Greek on a wall in the stricken town. “Lord Christ, help the city,” he wrote, “and smite the Avars and watch over the land of the Romans and the writer. Amen.”

  Certainly from that day forth the “land of the Romans” was indeed in dire need of help. Sirmium was surrendered to the besieging barbarians, and as part of the surrender terms, the Roman authorities were allowed to evacuate the city’s surviving inhabitants.

  With strategic Sirmium safely in their hands, the Avars demanded a 25 percent increase in the peace payments, to 100,000 gold solidi per year. Instead, the Roman emperor, a military man named Maurice, tried to fob the kagan off with a pet elephant and a solid gold bed. The kagan, who was nobody’s fool, sent them back and told the emperor he’d prefer cash—regularly.

  Maurice, who was notorious even among his own troops for being somewhat careful with his money, said no. The Avar kagan was furious and promptly launched a new invasion. After seizing the neighboring city of Singidunum (now Belgrade), at the junction of the Sava and the Danube, the Avars swept eastward along the southern bank of the Danube and spent the winter of 583–584 on Roman territory on the Black Sea coast.

  Within a few months, Maurice had capitulated to the kagan’s demands. The 25 percent increase was duly paid, and the Avar warriors were withdrawn back to Avar territory in present-day Serbia and Hungary.

  But the kagan had several more aces up his military sleeve. Within just a few months, the Slavs living on Avar-controlled land invaded Roman territory—no doubt with Avar encouragement—and attacked the great city of Hadrianopolis (modern Edirne), just over a hundred miles west of Constantinople.

  Having turned the screw tighter, the kagan seems then to have made yet more financial demands on the emperor—and was once again turned down. In the seventh-century book The Miracles of St. Demetrius, the author, Archbishop John of Thessalonica, described how “the chief of the Avars, having sent an embassy to the Emperor Maurice which met with a rebuff, then looked for means to inflict the greatest possible damage on him.”4

  The damage was done by a huge army of Avars and Slavs sent by the kagan into Greece. Parts of Corinth and the lower city of Athens were sacked. From Corinth, the canopy of the church was carried off. In Athens, archaeologists have found evidence of the destruction of the great marketplace.5

  The barbarian forces even tried to capture Thessalonica. On 22 September 586 a huge horde approached the city. “This was the greatest army that has ever been seen in our time,” wrote the author of The Miracles of St. Demetrius. “It was estimated at more than 100,000 men and drank the rivers and wells dry and turned the land into desert.

  “There was great terror in the city which, for its sins, saw now for the first time, and so close too, an army of barbarians, something never before seen by anyone except those who had been on active service far away. All faces were glum and dejected.”

  The city had already been weakened and partially depopulated by a bout of plague that had raged there and in some other areas of the empire in 585 and the first half of 586. And yet the Avar attack failed. Thessalonica’s salvation was put down to the personal supernatural intervention of the city’s patron saint, St. Demetrius.

  Further Avar attacks took place in 587, when the Thracian countryside was ravaged and looted, and in 588, when the barbarians actually reached the Sea of Marmara, fifty miles to the west of Constantinople. Once again, yet more peace payments induced the Avars to withdraw.

  The Avar threat was still very real when, after signing a peace treaty with Persia in 591, Emperor Maurice moved large numbers of troops to the Avar front.6 Under Avar pressure and encouragement, Slav tribes began, around 600, to expand from what is now Serbia into the Istrian Peninsula and down the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic. So by the start of the seventh century, thanks largely to the key role played by the Avars and to the effects of the plague, there was now a potential Avar/Slav threat all the way along the seven-hundred-mile Balkan frontier, and the Roman Empire was facing economic and military disaster.

  PART THREE

  DESTABILIZING

  THE EMPIRE

  5

  R E V O L U T I O N

  “In this terrible tragedy, the emperor demonstrated his courage for, when a nurse tried to substitute her own child for one of his, he would not allow it but pointed out his own child.¹ And, some report, milk flowed with the blood as the boy was killed so that all who saw it wept bitterly. And so at last the emperor, having shown himself above the law of nature, exchanged life for death. From that time on, vast disasters and many calamities continued to afflict the Roman Empire.”²

  That is how the eighth- and ninth-century Greek historian Theophanes described a particularly poignant episode in the tragic execution of much of the imperial family during a popular yet bloody revolution that engulfed Constantinople in November 602. It was an event of pivotal importance in the history not only of the Roman Empire but of the world as a whole.

  In a sense, its consequences still reverberate tod
ay, for it weakened the empire at a critical time and led directly to the de-Romanization of most of the Balkans, the loss of 70 percent of the empire, and, perhaps most significant, the rise of Islam.

  But how did the mighty Roman Empire come to be humbled by a populist revolution?

  As we have seen, for some thirty years the empire had been milked of vast quantities of gold, up to thirty thousand pounds of it—the protection money paid to the Avars. In addition, successive bouts of plague and war had reduced the empire’s population—and thereby its tax base—by up to a third.

  Emperor Maurice’s solution was to try to make the army more productive, but at the same time not just to pay it less but to replace cash payments with payments in kind—usually of military equipment. Then he changed the war-booty apportionment system in such a way that the imperial government got a much larger slice and the soldiers a smaller one. None of this sat well with the army rank and file. Nor were they pleased with the emperor’s refusal to pay ransom money to the barbarians for the return of colleagues who had been captured.

  One officer, speaking out against the imperial government, said the emperor’s “avarice produces nothing good and honest, but it is the mother of all troubles.”³ Furthermore, it was said that Maurice sent money to the clergy throughout the empire “in order to gain their prayers, so that he might make atonement in this world rather than the next.”4

  The last straw came when the emperor ordered the army to cross the Danube and spend the winter in barbarian territory. It refused to move, and in mid-November 602 it mutinied and chose as its leader an outspoken centurion by the name of Phocas—a ruthless soldier who was destined to become emperor within less than a fortnight.

  Having concluded—correctly—that Phocas was “a lover of blood and slaughter,” Maurice took the precaution of mobilizing Constantinople’s home guard. He also staged a day of chariot races and other circus games in a last, desperate bid to prevent the population from being influenced by the mutiny, but the ploy backfired. At the games, one of the capital’s political factions—the so-called Greens5—shouted to the emperor that if he wanted to avoid bloodshed, he should sack his finance minister.6

  Theophanes wrote that at this juncture, the people “could not bear the rule of Maurice any longer” and invited the emperor’s eldest son, Theodosius, to become emperor, or, if he was unwilling, his father-in-law, Germanus. Maurice then tried to have Theodosius flogged and Germanus arrested. But the people protected them and rose in revolt, shouting, “Let any who love you, Maurice, be flayed alive.”

  As the Greens and others demonstrated in the streets, and the mansion of a prominent government official went up in flames, the home guard deserted their positions on the city walls.

  “Throughout the night the people swarmed around, shouting obscene slogans and filthy insults against the emperor and hurled insults and even made fun of the Patriarch,” noted Theophanes. At midnight, Maurice at last realized his position was untenable. After shedding “his official insignia and dress, and clad as a private citizen, he boarded a warship at midnight with his wife, children and [his most trusted official] Constantine [Lardys] and sought safety by fleeing.”7

  Germanus tried to bribe the Greens into making him emperor, but they turned him down. Instead, they left the city and joined forces with the mutineers’ leader, Phocas. Phocas immediately convened a conference to decide who should be emperor and was himself nominated by the Greens and others. He was then crowned by the Patriarch of Constantinople in the great church of St. John the Baptist, just outside the metropolis, and entered the capital two days later in the imperial chariot.

  The following week a reign of terror began. Phocas decided to eliminate the former imperial family completely, so “he sent soldiers with orders to kill Maurice and his family.

  “His five boys,” wrote Theophanes, “were first killed before the emperor’s own eyes, thereby first punishing the emperor through the murder of his children.8 Maurice bore the tragedy with firmness of mind, continuously invoking God, the presider over all things, and saying reflectively over and over again: ‘Just art thou, O Lord, and just are thy judgements.’ ” Then the former emperor himself was executed.

  Phocas issued orders that the heads of Maurice and his sons be put on public display. According to Theophanes, “The citizens all went out of the city to witness this show while the heads rotted.”

  Maurice’s wife and daughters were not executed at this time but were placed in a convent.9 Other supporters of the former government were systematically rounded up and murdered. The former praetorian prefect, Constantine Lardys, and Maurice’s eldest son, Theodosius, were executed at the Diadromos (probably a stadium),10 while the army’s commander in chief, the patrician Comentiolus, “was slain on the far side of the Golden Horn [waterway], by the Church of St. Conon, by the shore, and his body was eaten by the dogs.”11

  The following year the empire began to feel the repercussions of revolution. Both internally and externally, the destabilization caused by the mutiny and the fall of Maurice began to make itself felt. In Constantinople, riots broke out. The new authorities, ruthless as they were, lost control, and a large section of the city was burned to the ground by disaffected citizens. The leader of the Greens, who had helped bring Phocas to power, was himself killed in the mayhem.

  Externally, the relationship between the Roman Empire and its archrival, the Persian Empire, was fatally undermined. The Persian ruler, Chosroes II, had enjoyed an extremely cordial relationship with Maurice (to whom he owed both his life and his throne).12 He was very angry when he heard that his friend had been murdered, and refused point-blank even to receive ambassadors from the new Roman government.13

  The mutiny and revolution not only resulted in civil unrest but also split the army itself in places. In the east, an experienced Roman general, Narses—who had in the past been much feared by the Persians—rebelled against Phocas, took control of the city of Edessa (now Urfa in southeastern Turkey), and “wrote to King Chosroes begging him to assemble his army and invade Roman territory.”14

  In direct response to the destabilization of the Roman imperium, the Persians swooped like vultures on the stricken empire in late 603. At the first encounter the Roman commander, Germanus, was fatally wounded, and Phocas withdrew troops from the Avar frontier to the new Persian one. At the first major battle—at the river Arzamon (near Mardin in southeastern Turkey) in early 604—the imperial forces were utterly crushed.

  Theophanes wrote that the Persian king “drew up his elephants like a camp and gave battle, winning a great victory and capturing very many Romans, whom he beheaded.” The Roman general Leontius escaped the Persians but was arrested on Phocas’ orders and brought in chains to Constantinople. The rebel Narses was then finally apprehended, and publicly burned to death in the capital.

  Order was also breaking down in Antioch, Palestine, and Egypt, the sources of at least a third of the empire’s tax revenues. In Antioch people were cut down by troops as they assembled in the city’s major church, and according to the historian John of Nikiu, the slaughter continued until the soldiers “filled every building with blood.” The Antioch unrest was finally suppressed by a Roman general who had the rebels strangled, burned, drowned, or “fed to wild beasts.”

  In Egypt, anti-Phocas rebels attacked the local Roman governor and “put him and his followers to the sword”; five Egyptian cities fell to the rebels.15 And by late 603 or 604, although Phocas had paid out a fortune in peace payments to the Avars, their vassals, the Slavs, could not resist invading the empire once Roman troops had been withdrawn to fight the Persians. One frequent target for the Slavs appears to have been Thessalonica, which is known to have been unsuccessfully attacked in October 604 by an army of around five thousand Slavs, whose war cries the citizens’ “ears were well accustomed” to hearing.16 A true dark age had begun to descend on the “Eternal Empire.”

  The following year, 605, was no improvement on its predecessor. Mo
re blood flowed in Constantinople, and the Persians overran all of Roman Mesopotamia. The new praetorian prefect, a man by the name of Theodosius, who had succeeded to the job when the previous incumbent was executed, was in turn put to death, as were six other prominent officials. All were beheaded except one, who “had his tongue cut out and was spread-eagled on a stretcher and dragged about [the city] for a show” before being “taken down to the shore where his eyes were removed and he was thrown into a small boat and burnt.”17

  Whether drink, madness, or merely the intoxicating effect of total power was to blame for Phocas’ conduct is not known. It was probably a mixture of all three. In 606, for instance, at his daughter’s wedding, he became insanely jealous of the bride and bridegroom and started making preparations to have his own supporters executed for praising the newly-weds too enthusiastically. And in 607 and 608, after uncovering evidence of dishonesty, he ordered the killing of dozens of leading political and administrative figures—including the late Emperor Maurice’s wife, Constantina, and their three daughters, whom he had executed outside the city gate in the same ditch in which Maurice had been dispatched.