As we know, Heloise finally gave in to the combined pressure of Arsaphes’s and her own love. There was no need for the semi-miraculous intervention of Corneille’s high priest, reminiscent of that of the king in the epilogue of Le Cid. Justus Dion is more direct, and probably more accurate: “The princess resisted for three moons, and more. Then the desire she had for Arsaphes increased so irresistibly that one evening when he had come to see her quite unescorted, she threw herself weeping into his arms and became his wife.”
The marriage of Arsaphes and Heloise took place in a ruined city, but amidst the enthusiasm of survivors who might at last hope for peace. Barbarian blood mingled with that of the last of the Porphyries and for a while gave the City back some of its old vigor. But the first golden age of art and culture was over. With Arsaphes, the City was to turn away from servitude, from overseas trade, from the theater, and from a life of ease. The mercenaries would begin to build the Empire that neither the Porphyries nor the Venostae had been able to create.
The idea of Empire, which was to have such a profound effect on political and social history, was first introduced into the world, though if not in its full and final form, by a jumble of Syrians, Persians, Scythians, Mongols, and Libyans under the leadership of a captain from Bactria. And as a further paradox, the love story of the barbarian who knew how to dance marked the entrance on the scene of a people who, in a new age of war and violence, aimed first at peace. As successor to the Porphyries, whose name, language, and religion he adopted, Arsaphes also inherited their traditional enemies. While the ravaged City still echoed with both the obsequies of the victims of war and the celebrations of the royal marriage, trouble was already brewing on three fronts. Pomposa, Onessa, and the barbarians were getting ready to combine their efforts against the City.
IV
AQUILEUS
THERE IS A STRIKING CONTRAST BETWEEN THE CITY of the Porphyries and the Empire emerging under Arsaphes. Paradoxically, the mercenaries brought back liberty and independence. Servitude was over, with both its advantages and its disadvantages. At one blow the City lost the reputation for charm and easy living that had made it famous. For the one hundred fifty years between Arsaphes and Basil the Great, one can hardly name two or three philosophers, a single architect or painter, or more than three or four writers. The theater declined, night life faded. Before Arsaphes had been in power four years a kind of military and moral order reigned over the City. Justus Dion reports that prostitution, widespread in the Porphyrean golden age, though now not entirely abolished was very strictly controlled. The courtesans, whose houses by the harbor and in the fashionable districts used to be meeting places for elegant young men, important citizens, and officials (even the delegates of the High Council were occasionally seen there), now gathered together in special areas near the various army camps. The more fortunate among them took up residence near the temples, where the priests encouraged religious prostitution and regulated it for purposes of their own.[1] By another irony of history, this was one of the precedents—there were many more ancient ones—that made it possible for religious courtesans to play such an influential role, as we shall see later, in the Empire of Alexis.
The priests were building up their strength. The High Council had allowed them to celebrate their religion freely and to enjoy certain financial privileges and ostensible but empty honors. But it had taken great care not to let them acquire any influence over the masses. The merchant princes had regarded the soothsayers with the utmost suspicion, though they made no attempt to introduce into the City the gods of Pomposa, in whom they probably did not believe themselves. Two or three times in forty or fifty years the patriarch of Pomposa had been invited by the High Council to visit the City, but such visits were only the occasions for feasting and display. Trade was really Pomposa’s religion. The High Council did not harass the priests; it simply ignored them. But it also kept a close watch on them; and when Pomposa’s ascendancy ended, swarms of spies and informers in the pay of the High Council disappeared as if by magic. The priests at once seized the opportunity to establish their power on firmer foundations, and before another thirty years had passed they had become a formidable power in the State. Aquileus, their center, a town whose extraordinary fate we shall see later, grew ever greater in size and strength. Instead of the confusion that had reigned before, when there were many different religions and different gods, the priests combined to set up customs, rules, and hierarchies that were to last for many years. The role of priest came to be a coveted one, and young men of ambition saw it as either a career in itself or a spring-board that could advance them toward secular power. Arsaphes, far from opposing this trend, encouraged and made use of it. Because he had to make war he needed soldiers, and if he needed soldiers he also needed those radiant yet undefined forces that make men want to live and enable them to die. He saw the priesthood, and an organized and obedient religion, as a very useful instrument of government. Of course, the danger was that a caste might grow up that would eventually threaten the central authority that had originally protected it. Historians and philosophers later criticized Arsaphes for giving the soothsayers so much power.[2] But it was difficult to see so far ahead. The main thing was to keep religion and the clergy under control, so as to maintain order and win wars. Arsaphes kept them under control.
Arsaphes himself changed greatly during the twenty-seven years of his reign. We met him as a young captain, fond of the rigors of camp life, yet dancing with his mistresses at the court of the Porphyries. But when the young captain became a prince he soon presented himself to his people as a symbol and example of austerity. Between the seventh and twelfth year of his reign he spent a total of only four months in the City. Always in the field, always fighting, he showed tireless energy and unflinching rigor. There are countless examples of his courage and endurance, of his violence too and the rigorous demands he made on others, as on himself. Once when his men seemed reluctant to set out on foot across a vast rock-strewn plain, treeless and waterless, he even stabbed his own favorite horse and led the way. It is hard to imagine how the same man who was so helpless before the princess Heloise, at the very moment when power was his for the taking, should suddenly have been transformed into this fabulous adventurer of the southern plain and the north and eastern forest. But he had never ceased to be an adventurer. It was just that passion struck and weakened him for a moment—the right moment for winning an empire. For Arsaphes, as later for Basil and Alexis, everything combined to go on adding to his power and strength. One seems to see a flaw, a mistake, a suggestion that his luck is turning, but it is always just one more step toward the realization of the Empire. For nearly fifteen years Princess Heloise was by his side, representing with unfailing dignity the survival of the previous dynasty. When she died of the plague, Arsaphes himself became the true heir of the Porphyries, and his and Heloise’s two sons represented for everyone—except, perhaps, as we shall see, for themselves—the legitimacy of the princes of the City.
Even before the death of Arsaphes the Empire was beginning to take over from the City. The birth of the City had been linked with overseas trade. But Arsaphes looked chiefly to the east, to the land, to the deserts, and to the forests. Luxury was soon forgotten; pleasure was replaced by the disciplines of war. The harbor fell into disuse. Pomposa, unable now to profit from the City, was not content with ostentatiously staying away. By force or by persuasion exerted on allies, vassals, and rivals alike, she imposed a blockade that was sometimes very harsh. There were several clashes between the Pomposan forces and those of Arsaphes. At sea, Pomposa always won, so Arsaphes avoided maritime adventures and skillfully lured the merchants to attempt landings. Their third try was the biggest. One night at Cape Gildor, about 200 miles south of the City, the Pomposans landed five or six hundred troops which met with no resistance and seized several fishing villages along the coast without striking a blow. Strengthened by reinforcements, they thrust inland and after a few days had surrounded a camp
of Syrian cavalry stationed there to defend the coast in depth. Arsaphes made no move. Several of his advisers begged him to attack as soon as possible and stop the merchants from setting up a dangerous new bridgehead so close to the City. Arsaphes paid no attention. On the contrary, he withdrew all reinforcements and fresh troops from the area. All he did was contain the landing by maintaining a firm hold on the coast north and south of Cape Gildor. The Pomposans fells into the trap. Reinforced by fresh landings at the same point, they skirted the Syrian camp, which was still holding out, and advanced farther inland. Arsaphes quietly watched the invaders pour into the pocket he had prepared for them. When he judged the prize big enough, and a fresh influx of the enemy began to look dangerous, he drew the net tight at Cape Gildor and sent in against the encircled foe the battalions of Parthian, Bactrian, and Numidian cavalry he had been holding secretly in reserve. Pomposa tried to land fresh reinforcements at the Cape, but the barrier of City troops now stretched across the neck of the headland prevented them from reaching the main battle area. There, the Syrians made a sortie that took the Pomposans in the rear and compelled them to surrender.
The defeat of Pomposa at Cape Gildor freed Arsaphes from any danger of attack from the sea. But it was not enough to enable him to compete with the Pomposan fleet. A tacit agreement was made: the sea belonged to the merchant princes, the land to the City and Arsaphes. In the course of years this de facto truce even became a show of alliance. Arsaphes had enough enemies already. He needed to be free to defend himself north, south, and east. The City ceased to be a port open to the west, and became a camp, a citadel, the base for long expeditions against the kingdoms of the barbarians.
It was as if, before it gave birth to the Empire, the City had to undergo two kinds of apprenticeships, one after the other: first trade then war; first sea then land; first art then asceticism. The strange thing is that in both phases the City came into immediate conflict with those who most resembled it. The Porphyries lived in luxury and a certain refinement, and they had a taste for maritime venture, intellectual activity, competition in trade; and they came up against the merchant princes. Arsaphes, a Bactrian mercenary, a soldier of fortune, a disciplined warrior although of rough origins, had to fight chiefly against the barbarians. The explanation is that it is rivals rather than enemies who hamper our beginnings, and it is against them we fight until the great conflicts arise which decide ways of life, modes of thought, and the meaning of history.
Under the Porphyries the City had many philosophers and architects. Arsaphes surrounded himself with soldiers. Hermenides and Paraclites were succeeded by Bogomil, Labianus, and Odier. They often came from the very places where they were to fight, and knew the climate, the roads, and the ways of the people. When victory was won it was not too difficult for them to establish friendly relations with the population. Barbarians in the service of the City, they came to act as representatives of the City among their own tribes or in the towns where they were born. At the death of Arsaphes the City had almost ceased to have any influence along the northwest coast. Its pottery and fabrics, the fame of its artists and writers were no longer carried far and wide. The foreigners who used to be attracted by the brilliance of the City and its reputation now came there only reluctantly, when business made it necessary. Barracks stood where once there had been temples and palaces. The gaiety, lightheartedness, and charm of the inhabitants had faded with the cessation of pleasure and the rigors of war. The harbor was dead. But to the north, east, and south, in the forests and the mountains, and beyond, in the desert, the armies of Arsaphes advanced. The whole Amphyses valley, and the Nephta valley too, now belonged to the City. The fertile plains at the foot of the volcanoes supplied the armies and their contractors with nearly all they needed of wheat and barley, rye and millet. In and around the City, in and around Aquileus, in Amphibolus, and in the camps around the temples, there was enough food for thousands of craftsmen to gather to make pikes, lances, bows, and javelins. Arsaphes personally supervised the workshops that supplied his weapons. Bogomil, who was responsible for equipping the army, became a veritable dictator in the matter of supplies. Barbarians skilled in the making of arms were grouped together at various distances from the City in what soon developed into new towns. This was how Amphibolus came into being, between the mountains and the forests and on the road to unknown deserts. Aquileus, originally a religious center, also soon developed into a garrison town and arms factory. The laborers and craftsmen who worked for the army enjoyed special status. In law, slavery did not and never would exist in the Empire. But, in fact, the position of many peasants, craftsmen, workers in quarries and silver mines and oarsmen in the galleys was very close to slavery. The makers of arms, in particular, were in a way serfs: they were forbidden to leave the towns they lived in, they could not change their occupation or have anything to do with foreigners. But their duties carried with them considerable privileges. The City provided them with food, pleasure, and entertainment. Some of them, inventors of devices or techniques useful to the army, became honored and important people. Thus, at Aquileus, chariots armed with javelins or joined together with chains trailing spiked globes made their appearance. The new way of living gave rise to new occupations. Bands of entertainers and tumblers roved from town to town to amuse the workers and soldiers. Peddlers brought clothes, furniture, pets, sweets, musical instruments. A kind of crude internal commerce replaced the great maritime trade which under the Porphyries had sent out, to the ends of the civilized world, so many masterpieces of art and so many marvels of taste.
To facilitate this traffic, and above all to facilitate the movement of troops and equipment so that they could swiftly be concentrated in any part of the country, Bogomil established a network of roads that was to be one of the most important legacies of Arsaphes’s rule. From the City to Aquileus, then from the City to Cape Gildor, from the City to Amphibolus, and from Amphibolus to Aquileus, roads stretched out and multiplied, roads that were passable in winter as well as in summer, for chariots as well as for horses and foot travelers. They were several yards wide—sometimes 6, sometimes as much as 10—and they transformed both landscapes and living conditions. Chateaubriand, Lord Byron, and Théophile Gautier in the nineteenth century, and even Barrès at the beginning of the twentieth, took almost as long as Bogomil’s soldiers to travel from Cape Gildor to Amphibolus and Aquileus. Sir Ronald Syme’s excellent studies of roads in the Empire from Bogomil to Basil the Great[3] throw new light on the origins of the Empire; politics was so bound up with the means of communication that these essays constitute a genuine history of trade, manners, and administration in the Empire prior to the reign of Alexis.
There is also the question of water. Historians, especially in Germany, for a long time attributed the first great irrigation works outside the Amphyses and Nephta valleys to Basil the Great. But the work of the French Annales school has shown conclusively that it is necessary to go back far beyond the reign of Basil. Water was a primary necessity, in the first place for military reasons, but subsequently to support the colonies of veterans left behind to keep the peace and to make possible the agriculture and industry on which the craftsmen depended. Arsaphes surrounded himself with experts mainly from Egypt and the south of Spain, whose names have come down to us through various inscriptions, and as well as increasing the number of wells, springs, and fountains, began to sketch out the network of irrigation canals that Basil the Great later extended and was given the credit for. At the cost, no doubt, of countless victims, gigantic projects altered the courses of several tributaries of the Amphyses. Vineyards and cornfields multiplied tenfold the wealth and resources of a vast area between Aquileus, Evcharisto, and Parapoli.
What is striking about this phase of the City’s history is its comparative simplicity. After the intrigues of the Porphyries and the merchant princes, after the subtle intellectualism of the City’s first golden age, after opulence and luxury, after so much talent and imagination, it was as if the harshness
of the early days had come back again, and with it not only hardship, but also unaffected and unostentatious pleasures. Genius now found its expression in military operations. The campaigns of Arsaphes against the Tartars and the Scythians, of Bogomil against the Oïghurs, of Labianus against the Hobbits, and of Odier against the Khazars and the Kaptchaks are still models of their kind. Like those of Napoleon later, they are all based on swift deployment of forces, massive attack on weak points, surprise. Everything contributed to make such military successes possible: rough conditions, the way society was organized, the progress made in the development of weapons, the network of highways, the irrigation system which brought bigger harvests and made it possible to build up the reserves needed by armies in the field. Hitherto the soldiers had been motley bands of mercenaries from the most diverse regions; now an iron discipline welded them into unity. At first Odier divided the army up according to language, as the Pomposans had done, but it was soon clear that this led to divided loyalties. So Bogomil and Labianus built up a system of groups, cohorts, and sections. Gradually a military aristocracy developed. Arsaphes encouraged it by giving its members official posts, strongholds to defend, provinces to administer. He appointed a committee of twelve, and a hundred and forty-four administrative officers; he set up a corps of special envoys plenipotentiary who represented him everywhere and took orders only from him. Into small towns and rural areas that had never had more than a vague, imaginary idea of what the City and Aquileus meant, these intermediaries introduced supreme power, with both its justice and its demands. The tribute of the conquered had to make up as best it could for the vanished profits of the maritime trade. Shopkeepers, big merchants, makers of luxury goods were ruined. The State was not rich, but it had enough to maintain a formidable army and an administration which, though rudimentary, was sufficient to dispense justice and collect taxes. The priests were powerful but obedient. And so the Empire was born.
The Glory of the Empire Page 6