Empires and Barbarians (65 page)

Up to about 600
AD
the eastern half of the Roman Empire, with its capital at Constantinople, maintained its imperial credentials as the dominant power of the Mediterranean. Strong though his position was in the 510s, Theoderic the Ostrogoth had held back from making his claim to imperial power absolutely explicit, for fear of alienating the rulers of Constantinople. And in the next generation, the astuteness of the king’s judgement showed through, when Justinian’s forces, in twenty years of brutal warfare from 536, played more than just a walk-on role in the emergence of imperial power north of the Alps by destroying the Ostrogothic Italian kingdom. This military adventure followed an astonishingly successful earlier conquest of the Vandal North African kingdom in 532–4. Then in the early 550s, in Justinian’s later years the east Romans established a toehold in southern Spain. Constantinople’s domination of the Mediterranean had moved from latent to manifest within the space of about twenty years.

East Rome’s collapse in the seventh century from these heights of imperial grandeur was every bit as dramatic as that of its western counterpart in the fifth. In the early 610s, it looked as though it was about to be conquered by its traditional
bête noire
, Sasanian Persia, which took control of many of its key revenue-producing districts: Syria, Palestine and Egypt. By 626, a Persian army was even camped on the south side of the Bosporus, while its nomadic Avar allies besieged Constantinople, just over the water. Astonishingly, the Empire clawed its way back from the jaws of this defeat. Constantinople survived the siege, and the Emperor Heraclius mounted a series of campaigns through Armenia into Mesopotamia which, by autumn 628, had brought Persia to the brink of collapse. The Sasanian King Khusro II, who had launched the war of conquest, was deposed, and most of the conquered territories were restored to Heraclius’ rule.

No sooner was the ink beginning to dry on the history of Heraclius’ great victory, however (provisional working title:
The Original Comeback Kid
), than it had to be deposited in the nearest waste-papyrus bin. Out of a long-neglected corner of the Near East burst a new enemy – Arab tribes united only within the last decade by Islam and Muhammad – sweeping all before them. Heraclius’ triumph turned to dust in his mouth as, before the end of his reign, Syria, Palestine and Egypt
were all lost once more, and Asia Minor turned into a battle-ravaged wasteland. By 652, other Arab armies had conquered the entire Persian Empire, and within a further two generations the new Empire of Islam stretched from India to the Atlantic.
⁵⁸

The details of this astonishing revolution in world history are not central to this study. Suffice it to say – and this will come as no surprise – that nearly as many reasons have been offered for east Roman imperial collapse as for that of its western counterpart. Traditional lines of explanation have often centred on Justinian’s conquests in the western Mediterranean, arguing that they were overambitious and left his successors a poisoned chalice of bankruptcy and imperial overstretch. But if ‘a week is a long time in politics’, as one British prime minister famously commented, this link looks hard to sustain. Justinian died in the mid-560s, the Arab conquest came seventy years – or pretty much three whole generations – later. The events could still be interrelated in some way, of course, but they don’t look like simple cause and effect. More recently, those concentrating on internal reasons for Constantinople’s collapse have switched their attention to alternatives: the periodic sequence of plagues that afflicted the Mediterranean world from 540 onwards, and – perhaps related – signs of possible later sixth-century economic decline in the Roman Near East.

These explanations all have something to say, but outside factors also need to be taken into account: not least, the all-in knock-down twenty-five-year war between Constantinople and the Persians that immediately preceded the Arab conquests. Persia and eastern Rome fought one another on and off throughout the sixth century, but for the most part only in limited fashion: through surrogates in Caucasia, or by sieges designed to capture the odd strategic fortress. This restricted pattern of warfare fizzled out in the early seventh century, when the two powers fought each other head on, and ultimately to a standstill. There was a triumphant fightback by Heraclius when all seemed lost, but the terms of the 628 peace treaty show that the end result was actually a draw, through exhaustion. Despite Heraclius’ victories, Constantinople failed to get back every piece of territory lost since 602. This, of course, immediately provides part of the explanation for the Arab victories over both empires that quickly followed.
⁵⁹

But attention also needs to be paid to the Arab world itself. Here, the galvanizing effect of Muhammad’s new religion, creating unity within a previously fragmented population, ranks centre-stage. But, as
with the appearance of new confederations capable of forming successor states out of the western Empire’s periphery in the late fourth and the fifth century, there is a backstory here of huge importance. Looked at in the round, the evidence demonstrates a steady growth in the size and power of Arab client states on the fringes of the Roman and Persian Empires between the fourth and sixth centuries, just as there had been in those of the western Empire’s European peripheries between the first and the fourth.
⁶⁰
What concern us here, however, are the broader effects of this seventh-century revolution on European-wide patterns of power. Two stand out.

First, the rise of Islam destroyed east Rome as a truly imperial, supraregional power. If you read texts produced in Constantinople after the deluge, this is not immediately obvious, and the city itself was not to fall to a Muslim power until Mehmet the Conqueror’s cannon finally blasted a hole through the city’s great Theodosian landwalls in 1453, near the modern Topkapi bus station. For most of the preceding seven hundred years, the rulers of the city had called themselves ‘Romans’ (even while writing in Greek), and maintained all the old Roman ideologies of supremacy: claiming to be god-appointed emperors, whose job it was to bring proper order to the entire human cosmos.

As in so many contexts, though, it is important to look beneath the surface. Then, what really strikes you about Constantinople after the mid-seventh century is how much state power had haemorrhaged away. Islamic conquest deprived Constantinople of many of its richest provinces: Syria, Palestine and Egypt in the first generation, quickly followed by North Africa about forty years later, and eventually Sicily as well. Asia Minor was retained, but became a major battlefield in further conflicts with the new Islamic state, and the archaeological evidence shows how badly its economy was affected. All the great cities of antiquity, where they survived at all (and some didn’t), ceased to be major centres of population, manufacture and exchange, being transformed into military fortresses and command posts. Coinage, likewise, became exceedingly scarce, and everything points to a massive simplification of the economy. Before these disasters, the east Roman Empire was quite similar in ‘shape’ to the Ottoman Empire of the sixteenth century, from which interesting tax records survive. These can be used to gloss the likely extent of Constantinople’s losses in the earlier period in terms of state revenue (although the overwhelming
nature of the disaster is anyway clear). And if you do the calculations and make some appropriate adjustments, it becomes apparent that the rise of Islam deprived Constantinople of between two-thirds and three-quarters of its revenues; that is, of between two-thirds and three-quarters of its capacity to act.
⁶¹

The consequences of this diminution show up with great clarity in the big picture of European history after 600
AD
. From the early seventh century, Constantinople was no longer a pan-Mediterranean power and major player on the broader European stage. Though still important in the eastern Mediterranean, it became in many ways an unwilling satellite state of the Islamic world, no longer substantially in charge of its own fate. Its subsequent periods of prosperity and decline correlate closely and inversely with the history of the new Islamic power block. When Islam was politically united, Constantinople was condemned to decline; when – as sometimes happened – Islam itself fragmented, there was room for modest expansion. In short, the self-proclaimed imperial Romanness of the rulers of post-seventh-century Constantinople is a chimera. The losses suffered at the hands of Islam meant that these emperors were now ruling what was as much a successor state to the Roman Empire as any of the new powers of the Roman west a century earlier. My own preference, in fact, is to use ‘Byzantine’ rather than ‘east Roman’ from the mid-seventh century, as a reflection of how great a sea change the rising tide of Islam had created in Mediterranean history.
⁶²

Second, the reverse of the same coin, Islamic explosion created a new superpower on the south-eastern fringes of Europe. It engulfed not only much of the east Roman Empire, and certainly its richest territories, but its old Sasanian sparring partner too. The result, when some of the dust had settled by the early eighth century, was a gigantic Empire running all the way from Spain to northern India. Ruling such an enormous entity using pre-modern communications was always a logistic nightmare, in addition to which there were major ideological divisions over how the Islamic Empire should be run, and by whom. Not surprisingly, therefore, its internal history was rarely stable. Even if their political control was always a bit arthritic, though, and certainly declined with distance from their respective capitals, both the Umayyad Caliphate centred on Damascus between the 660s and the mid-eighth century, and the Abbasid Caliphate centred on Baghdad from the later eighth to the early tenth, represented huge concentrations of imperial
wealth and power, on a scale that surpassed even that of the Roman Empire at its height.
⁶³
This superpower based in the Near Eastern fringes of the European landmass was too far away to intervene directly in the unfolding history of migration and development in barbarian Europe, but its indirect effects on these processes were enormous. Not only did it remove the east Roman Empire from the map of major players in European history, but, as we shall see in the chapters that follow, its diplomatic and economic tentacles stretched up through the Caucasus on to the western steppe, and from there beyond, into eastern and even northern Europe.

In part, the fall of west Rome (and that of the Roman east too, for that matter) has to be understood as the playing-out of the full consequences of development processes that had been at work throughout the half-millennium of the Empire’s existence. Much of the new strategic pattern that prevailed across the European landscape from around 500
AD
was dictated by the emergence of a supraregional power block in northern Europe made possible by the transformations of the previous five hundred years. As we have seen, in the late fifth century the Franks emerged as a new force in the old Empire’s inner periphery. They proceeded to combine their original homelands with former imperial territory west of the Rhine and other parts of Rome’s inner and outer peripheries. The resulting imperial power block was the first of its kind based on the exploitation of northern, non-Mediterranean, European resources. There is a very real sense, therefore, in which the Roman Empire, in the long term, sowed the seeds of its own destruction. Its economic, military and diplomatic tentacles transformed adjacent populations until they were strong enough to rip it apart.

But if the nature of Empire after Rome was in one sense almost predictable, the usual dose of historical accident also played its part. Thinking about the patterns of transformation in the round, then what
you might have expected to see was fringe pieces of Roman territory falling into the hands of ever more ambitious and aggressive frontier dynasts as, over time, economic and political change increased the power at their disposal and slowly eroded the initial power advantage that had allowed the Empire to establish such widespread dominion in the first place. Indeed, such a sequence of events did begin to unfold in the Roman period. In the third century, Transylvanian Dacia and lands between the Carpathians and the Danube had to be ceded to the Goths and other new powers of the Empire’s east European periphery, while in the west Alamanni took possession of the abandoned
Agri Decumates
. In the fourth century, in similar vein, a particularly aggressive king of the Alamanni such as Chnodomarius could extend his control to the western side of the Rhine valley, and Salian Franks made moves on land west of the lower Rhine frontier. At this point, imperial power was still strong enough to keep such ambitions in check, but the tendency is clear enough.

Instead of following anything like this scenario, however, the rise and fall of Hunnic power generated an unprecedented degree of politically motivated migration, which caused a sudden and unpredictable relocation on to Roman soil of militarily powerful groups from parts of its inner and outer peripheries. The first crisis of 375–80 saw Goths, Sarmatians and Taifali enter Roman territory from the inner periphery beyond the Lower Danube frontier region, to be followed in 405–8 by some of their Middle and Upper Danubian counterparts: the Sueves (if they were Marcomanni and Quadi) and Burgundians. Amongst groups from the outer periphery caught up in the same events we can number Alans, different groups of whom entered imperial territory both in 375–80 and again in 405–8, accompanied in the later crisis by Hasding and Siling Vandals, who hovered somewhere between the inner and outer peripheries – their territories were not that far from the frontier, but we know of no diplomatic relations between them and the Empire before the convulsions of the Hunnic era.
⁶⁴
These migrations caused the western Empire to suffer sudden and catastrophic losses of tax base in its heartlands, which in turn precipitated the total and equally rapid collapse of its military and political systems.