8 BECOMING CHRISTIAN 337–630

At the time of Constantine’s deathbed baptism in 337, the overwhelming majority of his subjects were still pagans. That is to say, they worshipped the traditional Greek and Roman gods in the traditional ways.

In fact, Constantine and the three of his sons who succeeded him moved cautiously in imposing Christianity on the empire. There was no attempt to repeat the excesses of their predecessors against Christians and create a new round of martyrs. To begin with, there was little even in the way of legislation. Instead, people were nudged towards the new religion by the exercise of high-level patronage. In Constantinople and the cities of the east, cash donations from emperors, generous tax breaks to Christian individuals and institutions, and state funding to build churches all had their effect, cumulatively, over several decades. But change was gradual. And perhaps even more important were grassroots movements from below.

This was particularly evident in some of the empire’s provinces: in Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia. Far more numerous than the martyrs who had preceded them, new generations of religious pioneers would once again prominently include women as well as men. And they would come from all walks of life, including the humblest. These were the people who would soon come to embody, in the minds of millions, the purest expression of the Christian life.

Some set out alone for deserts or mountains, to emulate the episode reported in the Gospels when Jesus retreated to the wilderness for forty days and was tempted by the Devil. Known variously as ‘hermits’ or ‘ascetics’, these individuals subjected themselves to ferocious conditions and privations, deliberately tormenting their bodies so as to perfect the soul within and prepare it for a better life after death. Just as Christ had fought against Satan, so these ascetics saw themselves as engaged in a cosmic struggle. The hermits who proliferated throughout Syria and Mesopotamia have been described as ‘wild vagrants dressed in skins, their matted hair making them look like eagles’. ‘Men of fire’, they ‘amazed and disquieted the Greco-Roman world by their histrionic gestures’. But they were not just loners. Turning their backs on society, the ascetics found that society came to them. People sought them out for moral guidance, to cast out demons, or just to gape and marvel at their endurance. A century after the time of Constantine, crowds would gather near Aleppo to gaze up at the top of a tall column where Saint Symeon Stylites lived for thirty-seven years perched on a small platform, sustained by food supplied by the local faithful and drawn up in baskets. Men and women such as these were the popular heroes and heroines of the day.²

Others created whole communities with similar aims. In Egypt, a villager by the name of Pachomius, who had converted to Christianity while serving in the Roman legions, seems to have been one of the first to establish a system of communal living for segregated groups of men and women, under strict religious rules and keeping their distance from towns and cities.

And yet, during an extraordinary period of twenty months, beginning in November 361, it looked as though the whole process might be about to go into reverse. On the death of his last surviving son, Constantius II, Constantine’s thirty-year-old cousin Julian, who had already proclaimed himself co-emperor in the west, became master of the entire Roman world. Posterity would remember Julian as the ‘Apostate’ or (in Greek until today) the ‘Transgressor’. On his father’s side, he was descended from the same Latin-speaking Balkan family as Constantine. Like Constantine, he had a Latin name. But his mother tongue, literally, was Greek. Julian was born and spent his earliest years in Constantinople. From there, he went on to study philosophy, grammar, and rhetoric in Athens. His military honours and ranks were all won in the west, where he commanded the legions in battle against German invaders from across the Rhine. But despite this, Julian’s heart and mind would always remain rooted in the Greek-speaking east.⁴

Even among Roman emperors, Julian was an oddball.

Devoted though he was to Greek philosophy, it was faith in a supernatural higher power, not the power of human reason, that inspired Julian. What the new emperor demanded of his subjects was uniformity of belief. The idea of orthodoxia, that had entered the language of official religion with the Nicene Creed, was now to be applied to the ancient myths and legends about the Greek gods. Conceding that Greek literature possessed nothing of its own to match the divine revelation contained in the sacred texts of Christians or Jews, Julian called for the old stories to be interpreted anew.⁵ Soon the religion he was promoting began to look and sound less like the old one it was supposed to restore and more like Christianity itself.

The task that Julian set himself was to turn the curriculum of a traditional Greek education into the basis for a religious faith. Those who shared in that education had long been proud to call themselves ‘Hellenes’. This was merely a reflection of the deeply embedded acceptance that it was education, not birth, that defined a person as ‘Hellenic’. Now, in Greek, the word ‘Hellene’ began to be used in the sense of ‘pagan’. It may even have been Julian himself who first used it in this new sense.

It all came to an end suddenly on 26 June 363. While leading an expedition against Sassanid Persia, Julian was struck by a spear and died shortly afterwards. Had he succeeded, he might have turned the eastern empire into something resembling a Greek state, defined by its culture and religion, as well as language. His failure also helps to explain why the Greek-speaking Christian empire that would soon become independent of Rome would ever afterwards continue to identify itself and its people not as Greeks (Hellenes) but as Romans (Romaioi). In hindsight, a newly rebranded ‘Hellenic’ religion could only ever have appealed to an elite, while Christianity was proving that it really was for everyone.⁶

Despite this, the eastern empire would never turn its back on the language and the educational curriculum that were also called ‘Hellenic’. Greek was after all the language of Christianity too. If the earliest Christian writers had been little versed in the Greek classics or the art of rhetoric, the deficiency had been made good long before this. In Julian’s day, the leading Christian theologians had been through exactly the same education in the Greek language and the Greek classics as he had. Indeed, two of the bishops still remembered as ‘Fathers of the Church’, Saint Basil the Great and Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, had been Julian’s fellow students in Athens. Together with Basil’s brother, Saint Gregory of Nyssa, and Saint John Chrysostom in the next generation, these men would go on to exercise an enormous influence to ensure that Christians would not forsake a system of learning that had served their own teachers so well for so long.⁷

The campaign that cost Julian his life was part of a series of wars on the empire’s eastern frontier that would drag on inconclusively for most of the next three centuries.

Holding the vast structure of the empire together under these pressures was proving too much for emperors, senators, and dispersed military commands. For what happened next, the model of systems collapse has often been invoked by modern historians.⁸ First of all, in 395, the empire was formally divided when Theodosius I, on his deathbed, split the succession between his two sons. Almost immediately, the western half began to disintegrate. Rome itself was sacked by a Gothic army in 410, then again by another Germanic invader, the Vandals, in 455. Nominally, the western empire would limp on until 476, when the last emperor of Rome would be unceremoniously deposed and replaced by a German who took the Latin title of rex, or king, that to Romans had long been taboo. By that time, the Roman Empire in the west had already broken up into a patchwork of petty kingdoms. This would remain the reality for centuries to come.

Constantinople was now on its own—no longer an imperial capital but the capital of the only Roman Empire that still existed. And it still was an empire, of perhaps thirty million people. Its territory stretched from the Danube in the north to the first cataract on the Nile at Aswan in the south and from the Balkan shoreline of the Strait of Otranto in the west to the Euphrates in the east. All the mechanisms remained in place for taxes to be raised and for grain to be shipped from Egypt to the capital and the empire’s other great cities. In most of the eastern provinces, levels of population and prosperity were once again on the rise.

This meant there was plenty of manpower to supply the ranks of the legions and to build and to crew ships. Since the time of Constantine, a new source of gold had been found far away in the Caucasus—a discovery that seems not to have been shared with the ‘twin’ empire in the west but provided the basis for a currency that would keep its value undiminished for hundreds of years.⁹ Under Theodosius II, who reigned from 408 to 450, the empire could mobilise the resources required to build the massive series of fortifications for the capital, known as the ‘Theodosian Walls’, that are still an impressive part of the cityscape of modern Istanbul. For the next century and more, while the remains of the Roman Empire in the west continued to fragment, the fortunes of the eastern empire were set to rise still further.

Officially, when the empire had been divided, the line had been drawn between administrative regions. But the real division was the long-standing one of language and culture that had existed since the time of Augustus. It was during the reign of Theodosius II that the Greek-speaking east began belatedly to acquire a political existence of its own. Even so, it was still not quite a Greek empire. Latin continued to be spoken and written at the very top—by the emperor, by his immediate family, at the highest levels of the administration, and by the most senior ranks in the army. And in both halves of the empire, ever since Caracalla’s grant of Roman citizenship almost two hundred years before, people had become accustomed to think of themselves as ‘Romans’. The difference in the east was that they did so in Greek, not Latin. They were Romaioi, not Romani. ‘Hellenes’, of course, had been given a bad name by Julian. Only those who still hankered after his failed project might still describe themselves in that way. With the collapse of the empire in the west, its eastern counterpart became, in reality, an entirely new and independent state, at once Greek by language and Roman in name: ‘a Greek Roman empire’.¹⁰

By the time of Theodosius II, it was also well on the way to becoming a Christian empire. New ecumenical councils were convened as new controversies erupted over the interpretation of matters of doctrine. The most contentious of these was how to understand the double nature of Jesus Christ as at once human and divine. Another was to define the Trinity, consisting of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, in such a way as not to seem to dilute the principle of ‘one God’, or monotheism—a complaint levelled by nonbelievers from that time to this. These debates may seem arid and abstract, even abstruse, today, but at the time the issues were capable of arousing the passions of large sections of the population. On the distinction between defining the nature of Christ as either homoousios (of the same substance) or homoioousios (of similar substance) as God the Father, the allegiance of whole provinces could be won or lost.

In Egypt and the Levant, the overwhelming majority of the faithful preferred a more rigorously monotheistic definition to the one that had been officially adopted at Nicaea in 325. But the double nature of Christ was reaffirmed in 451 at the council held at Chalcedon, on the opposite side of the Bosphorus from Constantinople. The finest intellects of the day were at once trying to keep pace and to guide the passions of the faithful. They also bickered shamelessly among themselves. Only the dogmatic determination of an emperor, in this case the successor to Theodosius II, Marcian, could push through a resolution and try to enforce it, as Constantine had done. But time and again, a single ‘correct belief’ (orthodoxia) would prove hard to foist upon unwilling subjects, even while Christianity was steadily gaining ground to become the majority religion and pagans were pushed more and more onto the defensive.¹¹

The tipping point seems to have come around the start of the fifth century. But that still left a sizeable population of pagans, or ‘Hellenes’, who either remained unconverted or actively resisted conversion.¹² Even before the empire’s division, the first Theodosius had begun legislating to ban pagan practices. Under Theodosius II, pagans were banned from serving in the highest ranks of the civil service and the judiciary. It is often hard to tell how thoroughly these and other sanctions were enforced, or how effective they were. There was never a policy of systematic persecution of pagan ‘Hellenes’. But there was little, either, to prevent outbreaks of spontaneous violence against individuals, institutions, or buildings. Usually, these would be spurred on by local leaders. On occasion, even an emperor would turn a blind eye.

In Alexandria, in 391, bands of zealot thugs, loyal to one of the least-tolerant bishops of the time by the name of Cyril, burnt down the vast temple complex dedicated to the Egyptian bull god Serapis, known as the Serapeum. It was the same Cyril who a few years later decided to round up and expel all the city’s Jews—probably one of the largest Jewish communities anywhere in the world at this time. This was in 415. In the mayhem that ensued, a Christian mob targeted one of Alexandria’s most prominent and respected ‘Hellene’ ladies. Hypatia was a teacher of philosophy and mathematics at the Mouseion, the institute of learning founded by the Ptolemies some seven hundred years before. The story of what happened next we owe to a horrified contemporary, himself a Christian and a historian of the church:

They dragged her from her carriage, took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her with tiles. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them.¹³

Episodes such as this have invited comparison with the terrorist acts of Islamist extremists in the twenty-first century. Palmyra in Syria, whose well-preserved remains were targeted by ISIS fighters in 2015, had been attacked and had sustained similar damage in 385 while still a living city—on that occasion at the hands of militant Christians from the desert.¹⁴ But it is worth noting that (again, like Islamist terrorism today) these were the acts of extremist individuals and groups. They were not ordered by the state. Most emperors, until well into the sixth century, seem to have been content to promote a policy of gradual assimilation rather than sudden coercion.

As a result, throughout this time, pockets of pagan beliefs and customs continued to coexist with a now dominant Christian culture. The last Olympic Games had been held at Olympia in 393, before the festival was closed down by order of Theodosius I. But their namesake at Antioch would keep going until 520. At some point along the way, athletes no longer exercised naked. Soon, it seems that nobody was exercising at all. The Greek word for physical exercise, askesis, had already been conscripted by the ‘ascetics’ of the new faith.

Theatrical performances involving singing, dancing, and slapstick comedy had been popular all over the Greek east for centuries. Called ‘mimes’ or ‘pantomimes’, these seem to have been the last gasp of the venerable tradition of Greek drama. Christian preachers weighed in against the ‘dishonourable’ profession of the ‘laughter-maker’ and ‘the man of many disguises, the unstable man, the easy man, the man who becomes all things’. Just so far had the mentality of the Greek-speaking world moved on from Homer’s Odysseus ‘of many wiles’ and certainly of many disguises. If ever there was a definitive ‘closure of the theatres’, like that of Puritan England in the seventeenth century, we don’t know when it happened. But along with less innocuous forms of entertainment, such as gladiatorial fights and wild beast shows, the Greek theatrical tradition certainly came to an end. Play texts were read and studied as part of an education that was still considered suitable for Christians—but for their language and style, no longer as living drama.¹⁵

Everyday life was changing, too. Constantine had given new secular powers to the highest local authorities of the church, the bishops. The Greek word for ‘bishop’, episkopos, from which the English is derived, literally means ‘overseer’. Charismatic and often highly educated, these men were elected for life, unlike municipal officials or provincial governors. By the fifth century, it was more often to bishops than to magistrates or imperial appointees that people looked for leadership in towns and cities. In the past, prominent citizens had vied with one another to pay for games, spectacular shows and buildings, and in this way to earn the gratitude of their poorer peers. Now, bishops channelled spare wealth to create hospices for the needy and the sick. Christian charity had become a civic duty by the fifth century. Bishops were not themselves either poor or humble. But they did preach the virtues of compassion, humility, and forgiveness, virtues which had no counterpart in older Greek thinking or behaviour. Above all, they preached the worth of every human being. And they preached the possibility of eternal salvation for the individual soul.¹⁶

The physical appearance of cities was being transformed at the same time. Ancient temples, with their long colonnades, still stood. But those that had not been converted into churches lay abandoned or in ruins. Worshippers no longer congregated in the open air in front of them. Outdoor altars no longer smoked with burnt offerings meant for the gods. Massed male citizens no longer feasted on the edible parts of ritually slaughtered animals. Worship had moved into the enclosed spaces of interiors which had never featured much in pagan worship. Perhaps this was a reflection of the movement from the extrovert and communal towards the inner world of the experiencing individual that marks the whole transition towards Christianity.

But there was one aspect of urban life that no amount of pious exhortation by the ‘Fathers of the Church’ could suppress. In Constantinople and in every large city of the eastern empire, crowds still flocked to the Hippodrome to watch their favourite riders race chariots against each other. Perhaps it was because so many other forms of public entertainment were being shut down, or withering away, that this one not only bucked the trend but actually grew in the numbers it attracted and the intensity of the passions it aroused. Originally, there had been four teams, all named after colours. But, by the end of the fifth century, just about everyone, from the emperor downwards, was a supporter of either the Blues or the Greens—and not just at Constantinople but in all the larger cities, such as Thessalonica or Antioch.

Since at least the time of Theodosius I in the late fourth century, rioting between supporters of the rival teams had often led to bloodshed. From today’s perspective, these public convulsions have been compared to football hooliganism. For once, it seems they had little or nothing to do with religion. The fans of the Blues and the fans of the Greens were nothing like political parties or even, probably, factions with a consistent political agenda. But by the start of the next century, in Constantinople, they were operating as political pressure groups powerful enough to make or break an emperor.¹⁷

When the emperor Anastasius died in July 518 at the age of eighty-seven, no plans had been put in place for the succession. The next highest authority in Constantinople lay with the Senate, that had been established by Constantine along Roman lines from the beginning. Unlike the original Senate, though, this one had never much say in the governing of the empire—except in a situation like this. It was supposed to be for the senators to name the new emperor. But power to control the streets lay elsewhere. The Hippodrome, built to accommodate a hundred thousand people, filled up with a chanting crowd. No doubt there had been work behind the scenes. It would be claimed afterwards that money had changed hands. The commander of the palace guard, a grizzled old soldier by the name of Justin, was certainly well placed to work the crowd. Before the day was over, Justin had entered the royal box in the Hippodrome and was being hailed as emperor by supporters of both Blues and Greens. This was to be the way for power to be transferred from one emperor to another on several occasions during the remainder of the century and well into the next.¹⁸

Justin was already in his seventies when he took office. When he died nine years later in 527, he had already appointed his nephew and adopted son, Justinian, to succeed him. The younger man was then aged about forty-five. According to a pen portrait written towards the end of his reign, almost forty years later:

In appearance he was short, with a good chest, a good nose, fair-skinned, curly-haired, round-faced, handsome, with receding hair, a florid complexion, with his hair and beard greying.

Most of these details can be confirmed from surviving images made out of mosaic in the Italian city of Ravenna during Justinian’s lifetime. The writer, a loyal civil servant from Antioch by the name of John Malalas, adds, perhaps dutifully: ‘He was magnanimous and Christian’. The historian of Justinian’s reign, Procopius of Caesarea, who had an axe to grind, although we do not know why, shows both sides of the man he certainly knew personally:

He showed himself approachable and affable to those with whom he came into contact; not a single person found himself denied access to the Emperor, and even those who broke the rules of etiquette… never incurred his wrath.… He never gave even a hint of anger or irritation to show how he felt towards those who had offended him, but—with a friendly expression on his face and without raising an eyebrow—in a gentle voice he would order tens of thousands of quite innocent people to be put to death, cities to be overturned and the confiscation of all their money by the Treasury.¹⁹

Justinian is probably best remembered today for commissioning the monumental codification of the entire corpus of Roman law that still bears his name. Announced within a year of his accession, in 528, its several stages were completed in only five years. Wherever legal systems today are said to be based on Roman law, it is the work of Justinian’s legal teams that is meant. This massive compilation was of course made in Latin, the language of the much older original documents that were edited and harmonised in the process. But as well as tidying up the corpus of lawmaking that his officials had inherited, Justinian would soon become a prolific lawmaker himself. Beginning in the 530s, new laws would be drafted not in Latin but in Greek. By the decision of an emperor who was himself a Latin speaker, Greek had at last reached all the way to the top to become the language of imperial legislation.

Along with all this legal activity, it is hardly surprising to see the full force of the law directed against the last outposts of pagan beliefs and practices that still existed in the empire. Right at the beginning of Justinian’s first compilation of laws, issued in 529, comes this directive:

All people who are ruled by the administration of our clemency shall practice that religion which the divine Peter the Apostle transmitted to the Romans. We command that those who follow this law shall embrace the name of Catholic [i.e., universal] Christians.

Other laws for the first time prohibited homosexual practices, overturning centuries of tolerance—even, in the case of classical Athens, celebration—of same-sex relationships. Also in 529, according to Malalas:

There was a great persecution of Hellenes. Many had their property confiscated.… The emperor issued a decree and sent it to Athens ordering that no-one should teach philosophy nor interpret the laws; nor should gaming be allowed in any city, for some gamblers who had been discovered in Byzantion had been indulging themselves in dreadful blasphemies. Their hands were cut off and they were paraded around on camels.²⁰

The philosophers seem at least to have been more humanely treated than the gamblers. A few decamped for a time to Persia. But the ease with which a pious civil servant could equate the great philosophical schools that went back to Plato and Aristotle with the gambling dens above the Bosphorus is revealing of the attitude of the time. Athens would never again be a centre of learning until the nineteenth century. At Alexandria, the teaching of philosophy would continue for a hundred years more—but with Christian teachers.²¹ The eastern empire was not only becoming more Greek, under Justinian it was also becoming more uniformly Christian, more centralised and autocratic than ever before.

But it soon turned out that Justinian was not yet secure on his throne. Trouble began, once again, with the fan clubs of the chariot-racing teams, the Blues and the Greens. Nobody could be above the fray. Justinian himself, according to Procopius, was a Blue supporter. In January 532, a flashpoint came when popular charioteers fell foul of the authorities. Soon fighting broke out in the Hippodrome in front of the emperor. Crowds massed in the centre of the city. True to form, the confrontation was rapidly becoming political. When supporters of the Greens demanded the dismissal of three of the emperor’s highest officials, Justinian gave way. But even this was not enough to quell what Procopius called the ‘mob’. Massed voices called on the emperor himself to resign. Chanting ‘Win! Win!’ (Nika in Greek), as they must have done regularly to cheer on their favourite charioteers, some began to hail one of their own ringleaders as emperor. Ever since, the event has been known to historians as the Nika riot.

According to Procopius, it was the emperor’s wife, Theodora, who stiffened Justinian’s resolve at this moment of crisis. By the time that imperial troops had restored order several days later, some thirty thousand citizens lay dead in the Hippodrome and the surrounding streets. Much of the centre of the city had gone up in flames, including the cathedral Church of the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia in Greek).²²

The sequel would change the geopolitics of the entire Mediterranean for the better part of two centuries and the cityscape of Justinian’s capital to this day. The emperor had come very close to being deposed by the power of the mob. He had been saved by the resolve of his empress and the bravery and resourcefulness of the commander of his guard, a general by the name of Belisarius. Justinian now had to prove himself in the eyes of his subjects. What he needed was a war. And he needed to win. The chants hurled at him by the rioters in the Hippodrome must still have been ringing in his ears.

A campaign against Persia had been going badly. But suddenly, in 533, a new opportunity presented itself in the west. Peace was hastily patched up with the Persians, and that June, Belisarius sailed out of the Bosphorus at the head of a fleet of six hundred warships, bound for the Mediterranean. Their objective was North Africa. For the past hundred years, the former Roman provinces there had been under the control of the Vandals, the Germanic tribe that had sacked Rome for the second time in 455.

On 15 September, Belisarius entered Carthage, the Vandals’ capital. Within a year, the entire North African coast had been brought once again under Roman rule. Belisarius himself returned to the capital to celebrate in a manner that has the ring of an old Roman triumph, being carried aloft through the streets by Vandal captives on New Year’s Day 535. But this was only the beginning. A second expedition that same year wrested Sicily from the Ostrogoths, who controlled all of Italy and part of the northern Balkans. A new campaign began on the Italian mainland. Rome itself opened its gates to Belisarius in December 536. The Ostrogoths withdrew their troops to defend their capital, Ravenna, farther north on the Adriatic coast. Three years later, Belisarius had Ravenna under close siege and finally took the city in May 540.²³

It had been an astonishing run of victories. Justinian gave orders for a column to be erected near his palace. Plated with brass, it was topped by a gigantic equestrian statue of himself holding a globe in his hand to symbolise his conquest of the entire world. The column and the statue would stand for close on a thousand years.²⁴ As the decade of the 530s ended, Justinian and his generals had everything to celebrate. Modern historians usually call it a ‘reconquest’. But none of the territories ‘reconquered’ had ever previously been ruled from Constantinople. The shape of Justinian’s new empire on the map looks quite different from any state that had existed previously. This new ‘Roman’ empire was a maritime one, unlike the old. It had been achieved by sea, very much as the earliest expansion of Greek speakers into the western Mediterranean had been more than a millennium before. For the first time since the heyday of the Hellenistic kingdoms, the centre of power in the Mediterranean world now lay in the Greek-speaking east.

In the meantime, on the home front, Justinian had mobilised the empire’s architects and builders. As soon as peace had been restored after the Nika riot, the task of rebuilding the centre of the imperial city began. The destruction offered Justinian the opportunity, and perhaps also the motive, to build on a scale that had never been seen before. To replace the destroyed church of Hagia Sophia, he adopted a design that was just then being pioneered. It was based on a rectangular space with a square at its centre and topped by a dome. Many centuries would pass before a version of this form of church architecture would find favour in the West. But it has ever since remained the basic design of most eastern Orthodox churches in the Balkans and Russia and would soon be adopted by Muslim architects as the template for the mosque.

Justinian’s church, the greatest of all the many building projects commissioned during his reign, was completed in five years—only a third of the time taken to build the Parthenon in Athens, with which it is often compared. It was dedicated in December 537, twelve months after Belisarius’s troops had reclaimed Rome for the empire. For a thousand years after that, Hagia Sophia would remain the largest religious building anywhere in the world. Its nave is eighty metres long. The top of its dome still rises fifty-five metres above the pavements of modern Istanbul. The creation of two Greek architects from Anatolia, Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles, Hagia Sophia successfully marries the old Greek science of theoretical geometry to Roman skills of practical engineering. Light filters into the huge open space through windows placed high under the dome in such a way as to create a perfectly enclosed world that also seems capable of encompassing the whole universe, under God’s overarching heaven.²⁵

Created out of the wreckage caused by the riot of only five years before, Justinian’s Church of the Holy Wisdom was the visible, monumental proof of how the Greek-speaking world had changed in the two hundred years that had passed since the death of Constantine. The triumph of Christianity was visible for all to see. And the new Greek-speaking empire, with its capital at Constantinople, was carrying all before it on the battlefield. Justinian could have been forgiven for believing, as he celebrated his victories at the end of the 530s, that the words addressed by Eusebius to Constantine had come true at last:

The image of the higher kingdom is reflected in the emperor who, beloved of God and in imitation of the Superior Being, by his governance steers the helm of all the world’s affairs.²⁶

And yet, far away, beyond the serene dome of Hagia Sophia, forces were already at work whose effects would severely disrupt the cosmic order that Justinian’s armies and generals, craftsmen and architects seemed to have created. Even while the great church was reaching towards the sky above Constantinople, volcanic eruptions in East Asia were hurling vast quantities of ash and debris into the upper atmosphere. The consequence, in modern terms, was a ‘dust-veil event’, that caused temporary disruptions to the climate over large parts of the world. No one alive in Europe or the Middle East at that time, of course, could have had any inkling of this. Modern scientists infer it from evidence contained in ancient tree trunks that reveals changing weather patterns far back in the past. Nomad horsemen from central Asia, who depended on the ‘delicate grassland ecology’ of that vast region, burst westwards and southwards towards Europe and the settled lands of the Middle East. In 539, great numbers of them, called ‘Huns’ by Procopius, crossed the Danube and broke through the undefended Balkans to devastate all of mainland Greece north of the Peloponnese. Their raiding parties even reached close to the walls of Constantinople itself.²⁷

Farther east, and probably from the same environmental cause, the balance of powers was shifting, too. A new king of Persia, Khusro I, known in Greek as Chosroes, accused Justinian of being in league with the nomads who were pressing hard against his own northern flank and aimed a preemptive strike westward towards the Mediterranean. In 540, a string of cities in the Greek east was sacked and burned to the ground. At the very time when Belisarius was accepting the surrender of Ravenna in the west, in May, the great city of Antioch was razed by Chosroes’s troops and its people killed, taken into slavery, or forced to flee their homes. Belisarius had to be brought back hastily from Italy to confront the new threat. Procopius, recording these events at the time, vividly expressed the perplexity felt by his contemporaries:

It makes my head spin to write of such suffering.… I cannot understand what God can possibly be thinking of, to allow a man or a country to rise to great heights, only to throw them down so soon afterwards and obliterate them without the slightest visible cause.²⁸

But worse was still to come. It has been suggested that those same climatic conditions that had brought the nomad horsemen sweeping out of the steppes may also have affected the rodent population in the regions bordering the Red Sea, bringing them into closer contact with humans. The first cases of bubonic plague, probably carried by rat fleas, were recorded on the Nile delta in 541. By spring the next year, the plague had spread throughout the Middle East and reached Constantinople. Over the next few years, it would rampage across all of Europe and the Middle East. In Constantinople alone, out of a population of some four hundred thousand, modern estimates put the number of deaths at around 20 to 25 per cent. The impact on daily life, as recorded by Procopius, resonates uncannily with the worldwide pandemic of Covid-19 that began in 2020:

No one was to be seen out buying anything. Everyone sat at home, those who were well enough either caring for the sick or keening for the dead. All work stopped, craftsmen laid down their crafts, and each person set aside whatever he was doing.

During a four-month peak in the spring and summer of 542, Procopius tells us, the plague claimed between five and ten thousand lives each day. The rational historian can only record, with horror, what he sees:

Some died immediately, others after many days. Those whose bodies broke out in black pustules, the size of a bean, would not see out the day, but died in short order. Many began spontaneously to vomit blood and died soon after.

What especially perplexed Procopius—and again he cannot have been alone among the sophisticated citizens of Constantinople—was the ‘absence of any cause for the disease that could be grasped by human reason’. Almost as bewildering was the unpredictability of outcomes. Doctors were as confounded as everyone else. People survived who had been given up for dead. Treatment that had seemed to help one patient might have the opposite effect on another. There was no precaution you could take, and of course no cure. ‘Suffering would strike without warning; recovery would happen all by itself’.²⁹

Many saw the affliction in literally apocalyptic terms. The end of the world and the return of Christ in judgement were at hand. Malalas, a devout Christian, wrote not long after it was over: ‘The Lord God saw that man’s transgressions had multiplied and he caused the overthrow of man on the earth, leading to his destruction in all cities and lands.’ A hymn by the great religious poet of the age, Romanos the Melodist, like Malalas a Syrian writing in Greek, sums up a sense of mingled doom and fulfilment that seems to have been widespread in Constantinople during the latter years of Justinian’s reign:

The last day is nigh,

Now we behold those things…

Nothing is lacking of which Christ told…: famines and plagues and frequent earthquakes.

Nation has risen up against nation,

Within all is frightful, without all is filled with strife.³⁰

Even the plague, terrible though it was, brought one unexpected benefit: the Persians found themselves hit just as hard, and in 545 made peace. This left Justinian free to turn his attention back to the west. Over the next decade, his forces went on to conquer the rest of Italy and all the islands of the western Mediterranean, as well as a slice of the southern coast of Spain captured from the Visigoths.

In Ravenna, the newly built church of San Vitale was dedicated in 547, seven years after Belisarius’s triumph over the Ostrogoths. The mosaics which decorate the apse are among the finest surviving examples of Christian art of this period. Among them are the side panels that depict Justinian and Theodora surrounded by elegant courtiers, churchmen, and ladies-in-waiting. The costumes, particularly of the ladies, are magnificent and flowing. The empress wears a diadem from which pearls hang down over her breast; the emperor, a jewelled crown. The heads of both the imperial figures are surrounded by golden haloes. Much of the background, too, is made of up glass tesserae coloured by real gold leaf. Curtains swing and part, a fountain plays. Although the expressions of the faces are sombre, the background, particularly behind Theodora and her attendants, is a riot of colour. All this is subordinated to a religious purpose, of course. The human figures are the servants of Christ, depicted high above them, and Justinian is holding a bowl of money which may represent his contribution to the adornment of the building.³¹ There is no sign, here, of the apocalyptic gloom that some were expressing in the capital at the very same time.

Farther afield, during the 540s and 550s, we get glimpses into a wider world that was still very much open to the future, indeed open for business. Throughout the Mediterranean, the effect of Justinian’s conquests was to give a new lease of life to long-distance trade routes that had languished since the collapse of the empire in the west. In a different direction, Greek-speaking traders were reaching out from Egyptian ports on the Red Sea into the Arabian Gulf and the Indian Ocean to reach the coasts of Africa and India.³²

In the 550s, one of these traders wrote a book based, in part, on his experiences. The main aim of Cosmas Indicopleustes (Sailor-to-India) was to prove, even against the better-informed scientific opinion of his time, that the earth was after all flat and that every inhabited part of it conformed to a divinely ordained pattern derived from the Bible. But Cosmas was also a curious observer of the places and people he encountered. He had travelled far outside the Roman Empire and had seen for himself how very much larger was the world beyond. He had encountered rhinoceroses and giraffes, though the hippopotamus he knew only from its name and its teeth, which he had traded. He had seen pepper and coconuts growing. His voyages had taken him as far as Sri Lanka (called Taprobane in Greek). He demonstrates the mentality of a truly global trader when he describes that island as being ‘in a central position’—obviously not in relation to his own homeland, still less its capital city, but rather to a maritime network that reached westwards to Africa, north to India and Persia, and eastwards to China, which he calls Tzinitza.

By the time Justinian died in 565, aged over eighty, not only had the empire expanded in new directions but the world itself had become wider too. Cosmas the Sailor-to-India may have been badly wrong about the place of our world in the universe, but his earthly geography was based on experience and remarkably sound. Cosmas appears to have been the first writer in Greek to know, at least roughly, where China is and how far distant. And however wishful his thinking, the confidence of this pious and presumably not unsuccessful Greek shipowner, writing in the 550s, in the aftermath of plague, warfare, and natural disasters, would seem to confound the more dire predictions of imminent doom that were circulating in Constantinople:

The empire of the Romans thus participates in the dignity of the Kingdom of the Lord Christ, seeing that it transcends, as far as can be in this state of existence, every other power, and will remain unconquered until the final consummation.³³

Modern historians frequently dismiss Justinian’s conquests in the west as a mere flash in the pan. The empire’s dwindling resources had been disastrously overstretched, so the story goes; the ‘regained’ provinces in the west could never have been sustainable in the long term. Procopius, writing in darkly satirical mode during the last years of Justinian’s reign, foreshadowed that modern interpretation when he caricatured the emperor and his wife Theodora as ‘blood-thirsty demons’ who had taken on human form for no other purpose than ‘to find the easiest and swiftest means of destroying all races of men and all their works’.³⁴ But some modern historians take a more upbeat view. Most of Justinian’s conquests were still holding up, come the turn of the next century, and some would last for much longer. By the year 600, although more ground had recently been lost in the Balkans, many towns and cities in the east, including Antioch, that had previously fallen to Persia, had been regained. Yet another peace treaty with the Sassanids had been concluded as recently as 591.³⁵

The architect of that treaty was a former general by the name of Maurice, who had become emperor nine years before. At the start of the seventh century, Maurice led a series of campaigns to win back territory in the Balkans. By the end of the campaigning season in 602, the troops had had considerable success. But when the emperor gave the order to keep up the pressure on the tribesmen during the Balkan winter, this was too much for the legionaries and they mutinied. The leader of the mutiny, a junior officer by the name of Phocas, led them towards Constantinople. So far, so traditional. It was a legacy of the earlier turmoil during the third century that emperors could be made, and also unmade, by the men they led into battle. But this was different.

As rumours of the troops’ approach swirled through Constantinople, the emperor announced a chariot race and everybody poured into the Hippodrome to watch their favourite champions. It is doubtful whether the fans of either the Blues or the Greens in the Hippodrome that November day had any coherent political objective at all. The same probably goes for the charioteers, though their managers had links to high places and probably did have an agenda of their own. Maurice’s calculation must have been that if he could secure the backing of both factions, as Justin had done a century before, he would have sufficient support in the city to face down the rebel army.

What followed was in many ways a rerun of the Nika riot. Fighting broke out in the Hippodrome and then spread through the city. It was not the soldiers gathered outside the walls who forced Maurice and his immediate family to flee for their lives, but the populace, whipped up to a frenzy by the cheerleaders of the rival sporting factions. Order was not restored until the emperor and four of his five sons had been apprehended and their severed heads displayed to the crowd in the Hippodrome.³⁶

With the deposition of Maurice, the treaty he had negotiated with the Persians under Khusro (Chosroes) II came to an end. The eight-year reign of Phocas saw the start of the last and deadliest of all the wars between Persia and a European power since the time of Alexander. In its first phase, it has also been described as a civil war between the army and the civilian elite within the Roman Empire. We only have one side of the story, but the accounts that have been preserved all portray Phocas as presiding over a series of purges, a brutal ruler who never managed to gain legitimacy in the eyes of his subjects.³⁷

Matters came to a head in 610 when a fleet from the North African provinces, that had been annexed under Justinian, arrived off Constantinople. The ringleaders this time seem to have belonged to the senatorial class. But they must have been efficient at mobilising the cheerleaders of the Blues and the Greens. While the new emperor, Heraclius, was receiving his crown, the dismembered corpse of Phocas was displayed to a baying crowd in the Hippodrome, and the severed head of one of his advisers was thrown into a public furnace. Others may have been burnt alive.³⁸

Heraclius’s reign began with a series of disasters. One by one, the great cities of the east were either sacked by the Persians or surrendered: Jerusalem, Alexandria, Damascus, Antioch (again). Almost all of the Balkans had already been overrun by groups of Slavs, Avars, and Bulgars by the time that Heraclius took charge. Thessalonica, the gateway to mainland Europe from the Aegean, held out almost alone—thanks to the massive circuit walls that had been built in the reign of the Theodosius II, though an anonymous chronicler of the time would give the credit, instead, to a series of miracles performed by the city’s patron saint, Demetrius.³⁹ Now the decision was taken to abandon the defence of the European provinces altogether and move all available troops to the eastern front. But not even this was enough to prevent a Persian expeditionary force from fighting its way through Anatolia towards the capital in 615. The enemy pitched camp on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus at a distance from Constantinople that today is spanned by three suspension bridges. In desperation, Heraclius made a humiliating offer of peace. If it had been accepted, it would have turned the Roman state into a Persian vassal. But Khusro contemptuously rejected the terms and murdered Heraclius’s ambassadors.

For the next ten years, the fortunes of war went to and fro. For a time, the Persians were pushed back into Anatolia. Then, in the spring of 622, Heraclius embarked on a daring plan. Determined to take the fight to the enemy, he left Constantinople to lead an army in person through the foothills of the Caucasus in today’s Azerbaijan. The strategy had not yet proved its worth when a Persian force once again appeared on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. This time a combined body of Avars and Slavs had massed on the European side beneath Theodosius’s great walls. It may not have been by prearrangement among the besieging forces, but Constantinople was surrounded. And now, if not before, the Persians began seriously to coordinate their efforts with those of the Slavs and Avars on the opposite shore. The siege began on 29 July 626 and lasted for ten days. The Persians had no boats to ferry their infantrymen across. But the Slavs did, and volunteered their services. The vessels must have been quite small, because the attackers had apparently carried them overland from the Danube (the Greek sources contemptuously call them ‘canoes’ or ‘punts’—monoxyla). So when the Slavs began to ferry the Persian troops across the Bosphorus, the fleet putting out from Constantinople was able to sink them.

Five days later, the Slavs made another attempt, this time to land their own men from farther down the coast. But the defenders got wind of the plan in time and lured the invading boats into an ambush in the narrow waterway known as the Golden Horn. It was the decisive moment in the siege. The two attacking forces had been prevented from joining up. Both had stretched their supply lines to the limit. On the night of 7–8 August 626, the Avars and Slavs set fire to their siege engines and retreated northwards into the Balkans. The Persians, unable to do anything but watch from the hills and shore of the Asian side, soon turned tail. Constantinople had been saved, and with it the Greek-speaking Roman Empire.⁴⁰

When Themistocles had famously triumphed over the Persian fleet using a similar tactic in the battle of Salamis in 480 BCE, the experience of deliverance had inspired the Greek city-states with a new sense of their own identity and the self-confidence to create the civilisation that we still call ‘classical’. Aeschylus and Herodotus had inaugurated the resonant and long-running cause of the ‘liberty of Hellas’; Socrates and the philosophers had championed the power of human reason. Now, in 626, the victory was attributed to the Virgin Mary, whose icon had been carried round the walls during the siege. The Church of the Mother of God at Blacherna overlooked the battle site on the Golden Horn, and she herself, it was said, had intervened to protect the Christian capital.⁴¹ If the aftermath of that first Persian war had brought out a spirit of unity among Greek speakers as Greeks, this victory, eleven hundred years later, was bringing them together as never before in their new identity as Christians.

An unprecedented kind of warfare was developing. Today, we call it ‘holy war’. The idea was made explicit for the first time when Heraclius launched his expedition through Transcaucasia to strike at the Persian heartland. On that occasion, the emperor urged his troops to ‘keep in mind the fear of God and struggle to avenge insults to Him’. Once upon a time, Greek city-states had fought to avenge damage and destruction to the citizen body, to cherished public buildings and sacred temples. But Heraclius’s enemies were the enemies of God himself. And however great the odds, the troops could rest assured that ‘Our danger is not without reward but is the harbinger of eternal life’.⁴²

It was a risky venture. But it worked. Less than two years after the siege of Constantinople had been lifted, Heraclius entered Persia from the north and the Sassanid Empire imploded. Chosroes was murdered by his own side early in 628. The whole of the Middle East, up to the River Tigris, was returned to Roman rule. So was Egypt, which for centuries had provided most of the grain that had once fed the people of Rome and until recently had done the same for Constantinople. For a few short months, it even looked as though the next king of Persia would become a Christian and be baptised with a Greek name. It would have been the ultimate vindication for a political state that now defined itself by the religious faith of its citizens. According to the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament, God had created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. In the same way, it was said at the time, Heraclius had laboured for six years on campaign. In the seventh, he returned to his capital—to commemorate his victory not with the parade of strength and riches that had marked a traditional Roman triumph but rather with a ‘mystic celebration’, presumably under the heavenly dome of Hagia Sophia.⁴³

Shortly afterwards, Heraclius set out for Jerusalem. Part of the ‘True Cross’, on which Jesus had supposedly been crucified, had been venerated as a relic in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre there, ever since it had come to light three centuries earlier. When the Persians sacked the city in 614, they had taken the prized relic back with them to Ctesiphon, their capital on the Tigris. Now, with the terms of peace, it had been returned. Heraclius determined that he would be there in person to oversee its formal restoration to its rightful place and in this way to mark the symbolic triumph not of Roman arms but of the Roman faith.

But first, before he left Constantinople in 629, Heraclius adopted a new imperial title. His predecessors had always styled themselves, in the Roman manner, either ‘emperor’ or ‘Augustus’ (Sebastos in Greek). In their Greek forms, these titles would have many centuries of life left in them yet. But alongside them, Heraclius became the first ruler of a ‘Roman’ empire to revive the long-disused Greek word for ‘king’, basileus.⁴⁴ From then on, this would remain the official title, in Greek, of every ruler to rule from Constantinople, even after Christian emperors had been replaced by Ottoman sultans, until the end of the eighteenth century.

The significance of this is not just religious. It is often pointed out that basileus had been the title of King David in the Greek version of the Old Testament, and Jerusalem had been his royal city. But for a far longer period, basileus had been the title of the ancient Macedonian kings and of the Hellenistic dynasties that had come after them. In styling himself ‘faithful Basileus in Christ’, Heraclius at a stroke redefined the empire over which he ruled: as the inheritor not only of God’s chosen kingdom but also of the great Hellenistic kingdoms that had preceded the power of Rome. What had once been a pagan empire was now to be a Christian kingdom, defined by faith and (although the second was only implicit) by the Greek language.

When Heraclius entered Jerusalem on 21 March 630, at the head of a solemn procession, and carried the fragment of the True Cross to the church that had been built over the site of Jesus’s crucifixion, it must have seemed to many of those present that something momentous had been fulfilled. Among the many prophecies about the end of the world that were in circulation by this time was one that imagined the last emperor of the Romans, or according to another version, ‘King of the Greeks’, setting up the Holy Cross on the site of the crucifixion, placing his crown on top of it, and ‘hand[ing] over the kingship to God the Father’. These events would be a sure sign that the Second Coming of Christ, the Last Judgement, and the Kingdom of Heaven were at hand.⁴⁵

Needless to say, Heraclius did not lay down his crown in Jerusalem and the world did not end. But with the change of royal title, in a sense Heraclius was the last emperor to rule over the people who still called themselves ‘Romans’. In hindsight, we can see that an era really was about to end, though not even the most apocalyptic of prophets could have imagined how. During the three hundred years since the inauguration of Constantinople, the Roman Empire had been transformed. Greek speakers had reinvented themselves once more, this time as Christian Romans. Their state was once again ruled by a basileus. And the city that Constantine had founded, now nicknamed the ‘second Rome’ or ‘new Rome’, had first eclipsed and then replaced the old one in the geopolitics of the Mediterranean and the Middle East.⁴⁶