Millenium (4 page)

The Roman Empire in
ad
395

marking out the street plan of his foundation with a spear, had been guided by the figure of Christ walking before him. Never again would pagan temples be built on Byzantine soil. No palls of smoke greasy with sacrifice would ever drift above the spreading streets. Graced with the splendid title of 'the New Rome', the capital would provide the first Christian emperor with the most enduring of all his memorials. Ever after, the Romans would know it as 'the City of Constantine' - Constantinople.

A seat of empire, to be sure—but hardly a monument to Christian humility. The leaders of the Church were unperturbed. Scarcely able as they were to credit the miracle that had transformed them so unex­pectedly from a persecuted minority into an imperial elite, they raised few eyebrows at the spectacle of their emperor's magnificence. Since, as St John had seen in his vision, the New Jerusalem would not be descending to earth until the very end of days, it struck most of them as a waste of time to preach revolution. Far more meritorious, the world's fallen state being what it was, to labour at the task of redeem­ing it from chaos. It was order, not egalitarianism, that the mirror of heaven showed back to earth.

What were the saints, the angels and the archangels if not the very model of a court, ranked in an exquisite hierarchy amid the pomp of the World Beyond, with Christ Himself, victorious in His great battle over death and darkness, presiding over them, and over the monarchy of the universe, in a blaze of celestial light? A Christian emperor, ruling as the sponsor and protector of the Church, could serve not merely as Christ's ally in the great war against evil, but as His representative on earth, 'directing, in imitation of God Himself, the administration of this world's affairs'.
¹⁷
In the bejewelled and perfumed splendours of Constantinople might be glimpsed a reflection of the beauties of paradise; in the armies that marched to war against the foes of the Christian order an image of the angelic hosts. What had once been the very proofs of the empire's depravity - its wealth, its splendour, its ter­rifying military might - now seemed to mark it out as a replica of heaven.

Naturally, the Christ to whom Constantine and his successors com­pared themselves bore little resemblance to the Jesus who had died in excruciating and blood-streaked agony upon a rough-hewn cross. Indeed, whether in the meditations of theologians or in the mosaics of artisans, He began to resemble nothing so much as a Roman emperor. Whereas the faithful had once looked to their Messiah to sit in awful judgement over Rome, now bishops publicly implored Him to turn His 'heavenly weapons' against the enemies of the empire, 'so that the peace of the Church might be untroubled by storms of war'.
¹⁸
By the fifth Christian century, prayers such as these were turning shrill and desperate - for increasingly, the storms of war appeared to be darken­ing all the world. Savages from the barbarous wilds beyond the Christian order, no longer content to respect the frontiers that had for so long been circumscribed by Roman might, were starting to sweep across the empire, threatening to despoil it of its fairest territories, and to dismember a dominion only lately consecrated to the service of God. Was this the end of days come at last? Christians might have been forgiven for thinking so. In
ad
410, Rome herself was sacked, and men cried out, just as St John had foreseen that they would, '"Alas, alas for the great city!"'
¹⁹
Still waves of migrants continued to flood through the breached frontiers, into Gaul and Britain, Spain and Africa, the Balkans and Italy; and this too, it struck many, St John had prophesied. For the end time, he had written, would see Satan gather to himself nations from the far ends of the world; and their numbers would be like 'the sand of the sea'.
²⁰
And their names, St John had written, would be Gog and Magog.

To emperors struggling to hold together their disintegrating patri­mony, such talk was pure sedition. To their servants in the Church as well, desperate to see the imperial centre hold, the strident anti- Roman sentiments of St John's Revelation had long been an embarrassment. In 338, a council of bishops had sought to drop it alto­gether from the canon of Holy Scripture. In the East, where the more prosperous half of Rome's empire was at length, and with colossal effort, shored up against collapse, the Book of Revelation would not be restored to the Bible for centuries. Even as the western half of the empire crumbled away into ruin, an emperor remained sufficiently secure behind the massive battlements of Constantinople to proclaim that God had granted him authority over the affairs of all humankind - and to believe it. Whatever the barbarians might be who had overwhelmed the provinces of the West, they were self-evidently not Gog and Magog - for the end of days was yet to come, and the Roman Empire still endured.

This conviction, simultaneously vaunting and defiant, would remain constant throughout the succeeding centuries, even in the face of renewed calamities, and the dawning recognition, hard for any people calling themselves Romans to accept, that the empire was no longer the world's greatest power. Smoke rising from the passage of barbarian war bands might repeatedly be glimpsed from the walls of the very capital; enemy fleets might churn the waters of the Bosphorus; frontiers and horizons might progressively contract, as Syria too, and Egypt, and Cyprus, were lost to the New Rome: and yet the citizens of Constantinople, no matter what the tides of disaster lapping at them, still trusted to their destiny. Like the Jews, they pre­sented themselves as God's elect, both afflicted and favoured on that account - and, like the Jews, they looked to the future for their ulti­mate deliverance.

So it was, some time in the seventh century, and amid an unprece­dented series of defeats, that startling prophecies began to circulate. Written, it was claimed, by Methodius, a saint who had been martyred some three hundred years previously, these appeared to lift the veil, just as St John's vision had done, from the end days of the world. No matter that Methodius himself had been executed on the orders of a Caesar, the writings attributed to him endowed the Roman Empire with an altogether more glorious role than it had been granted in Revelation. Teeming although its pagan enemies already were, Methodius warned, its greatest test was still to come. The hour of Gog and Magog, long dreaded, would come at last. Imprisoned for aeons on the edge of the world behind great walls of brass, these were barbarians of unspeakable savagery, devourers of'the vermin of the earth, mice and dogs and kittens, and of aborted foetuses, which they eat as though gorging on the rarest delicacies'.
²¹
Against the eruption of such monstrous foes, only the emperor in Constantinople - the last Roman emperor of them all - would stand firm; and in the end he would bring Gog and Magog to defeat. That great victory achieved, he would then travel to Jerusalem; and in Jerusalem, the Son of Perdition, Antichrist himself, would be revealed.

And then the last emperor, Methodius prophesied, would 'go up and stand on the hill of Golgotha, and he would find there the Holy Cross, set up just as it had been when it carried Christ'. He would place his diadem on the top of the Cross and then raise up his hands in prayer, delivering his monarchy into the hands of God. 'And the Holy Cross on which Christ was crucified will be raised to heaven, and the crown of kingship with it'
²²
— leaving the last emperor dead on Golgotha, and all the kingdoms of the earth subject to Antichrist, steeped in that profoundest darkness that would precede the dawn of Christ's return.

So it was to come: the last great battle of the world. Small wonder that Methodius's prognostications should have attracted attention even in imperial circles. They may have been lurid and intemperate, yet they could offer a hard-pressed emperor precisely what St John, in Revelation, had so signally withheld: reassurance that the Roman Empire would continue in heaven's favour until the very end of days. More flatteringly, indeed — that the death of its last emperor would serve to precipitate the end of days. Had not St Paul, when he spoke of Rome 'restraining' Antichrist, implied as much? No matter how shrunken the dominion ruled from Constantinople, its rulers needed desperately to believe that it remained the fulcrum of God's plans for the universe. What in more prosperous times had been taken for granted was now clung to with a grim resolution: the conviction that to be Christian was synonymous with being Roman.

Posterity, as though in mockery of Constantine's pretensions, has christened the empire ruled from his foundation 'Byzantium', but this was not a name that the 'Byzantines' ever applied to it themselves. Even as Latin, the ancient language of the Caesars, gradually faded from the imperial chanceries, then from the law courts, and finally from the coinage, the citizens of Constantinople continued to call themselves Roman - albeit in their native Greek. Here was no faddish antiquarianism. Rather, the prickliness with which the Byzantines, the
'Romaioi’,
guarded their name went to the very heart of their self- image. It offered them reassurance that they had a future as well as a past. A jealous concern with tradition was precisely what marked them out as a Chosen People. It served, in short, to define their covenant with God.

The City of God

It is true that the identification of Christendom with empire was not entirely without its problems. A certain degree of awkwardness arose whenever the
Romaioi
were obliged to have dealings with Christians beyond their frontiers. Imperial lawyers had initially spun the opti­mistic formulation that all of Rome's former provinces, from Britain to the furthest reaches of Spain, remained subject to the emperor. In the earliest days of their foundation, some of the barbarian kingdoms established in the West had been perfectly content to play along with this fiction - and even those that did not had on occasion been flat­tered into accepting certain tokens of subordination. After all, trinkets and titles from a Roman emperor were never readily to be sniffed at.

In
ad
507, for instance, a confederation of Germanic tribes known collectively as the Franks, axe-throwing pagans who had seized con­trol of much of northern Gaul, had won a great victory that extended their sway southwards as far as the Mediterranean — and Byzantine agents, hurrying to congratulate them, had awarded Clovis, their king, the sonorous if wholly empty title of consul. A year later, and

Clovis had shown himself even more an enthusiast for things imperial by accepting baptism.  What precise role the ambassadors from Constantinople might have played in this decision we do not know; but it must surely have struck them as a development rich in promise. For, by their own lights, to be a Christian was to be a Roman.

Not by the lights of the Franks, however. Although Clovis's people had plunged after their king into the waters of baptism, and although, a century later, missionaries dispatched from Rome would begin per­suading the pagan English too to bow their necks before Christ, no submission to a mortal power was implied by these conversions. Just the opposite, in fact. Kings who accepted baptism did so primarily to win for their own purposes the backing of an intimidatingly powerful god: so it was, for instance, that Clovis, as a symbol of his newly Christian status, had taken to sporting 'a salvation-giving war- helmet'.
²³
The very notion of tolerating an earthly overlord was anathema to such a man. Neither Clovis nor his successors had any wish to see a global empire re-established.

And already, by the seventh century, memories of Rome in the West were fading into oblivion. Massive still, beyond fields returned to scrub or marsh or forest, or above the huddled huts of peasants long since freed of imperial exactions, or framing perhaps even the high- gabled hall of a chieftain and his carousing warriors, Roman buildings continued to loom against the sky — but as the wardens now of an order gone for ever, slowly crumbling before the passage of suns and rains. All the complex apparatus of bureaucracy, the same that in Constantinople still served to feed the emperor, his armies and his taxes, had collapsed utterly into ruin, leaving, amid the rubble, only a single structure standing. The Church in the West, had it followed the course of its eastern counterpart and insisted that Christendom was indeed synonymous with the rule of Rome, would surely have shared in the general ruin. As it was, it endured; and by enduring, preserved something of the imperious spirit of what had otherwise been left a corpse.

'To rejoice in the vast extent of an earthly kingdom is behaviour that no Christians should ever indulge in.'
²⁴
So had pronounced Augustine, a bishop from north Africa, during the calamitous final century of the Western Empire's existence. But what of God's king­dom? That was quite a different matter. Bishops in the West, no longer able to rely upon a universal empire to shield their flocks from danger, could find in the writings of Augustine a theology infinitely better suited to their tattered circumstances than anything originating from the palmier days of the
pax Romana.
The great division in the affairs of the world, Augustine had argued, lay not between civilised and savage, Roman and barbarian, but between those earthly dominions of which Rome had been merely the most prominent example and a dominion incalculably greater and more glorious: the City of God. Within the infinite walls of the heavenly Jerusalem, all might hope to dwell, no matter what their origin; and the entrance way to this city, its portal, was the Church.

A glorious role indeed. Great empires, borne upon the surging flood tides of human sinfulness, might rise and conquer and fall; 'but the Heavenly City, journeying on pilgrimage throughout our fallen world, summons people from every nation, speakers of every lan­guage, taking no account of how they may differ in their institutions, their customs, or their laws'.
²⁵
Here, for all Christians in the West, whether in the old imperial provinces of southern Gaul, where bish­ops descended from senators still sat proudly amid the carcasses of Roman towns, or upon the mist-swept fringes of the world, where Irish hermits raised prayers to the Almighty above the ocean's roar, was a message of mission and hope. Everywhere, across the whole, wide span of the fragmented, tormented world, was the City of God.