The Xenophile Historian

A History of Europe

476 to 741

	The Rise of Feudalism
	Clovis
	Theodoric the Ostrogoth
	Justinian
	Justinian's Campaigns
	Avars, Lombards and Slavs on the Move
	Heraclius
	The Byzantine Way
	The Visigoth Kingdom
	The Merovingian Dynasty
	England: The Heptarchy
	Commerce in the Dark Ages
	The Church's Role in the Recovery of the West
	Against Islam's First Wave
	Iconoclasm: Act I
	Population in the Dark Ages
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The landlord gained all around. He tried to take his rent in produce where possible, for the less money he earned, the less the tax collector took. It became necessary for him to live on his land, rather than in a town, and soon he was overseeing the everyday life of his estate and its practically enslaved peasants as though no other authority existed.

By contrast, the barbarians were mostly warriors who still cherished their freedom. The only person they owed allegiance to was the leader of their band, and they expressed loyalty to him with an oath at the beginning of a campaign. In an era that saw wars every year, they might submit to the same man for many years, so they tended to accept a successful war-leader as a permanent king. Previously, the office of king was only a temporary post, to lead the tribe through an emergency, and even after the man with the crown got to hold it for life, there was no rule that said it belonged to his family. The rules of succession evolved slowly, their main purpose being to prevent a bloodbath at every coronation. While that happened, the Germans settled on Roman land and their warriors became landowners. However, they still owed an obligation of military service in time of trouble to the chief of the old war-band, and the chiefs owed the same service to the king. The peasants passively accepted the arbitrary rule of the new landowner and paid him rent in the form of produce or labor in return for his protection. They probably found him cheaper to support than a Roman who measured his standard of living by how many luxuries he could bring home from the cities; he also did a much better job than the Roman landlords when it came to defending the land and its tenants from military invasions.

By the time the barbarians carved up the Western Roman Empire among themselves, many of them were Christians, so the Church stepped in to make the change in rulership less violent. This mainly meant teaching the warriors that they now had a duty to protect the peasants, instead of plundering them. Once this was accomplished, the Church developed the idea that there were three basic classes of society, each interdependent on the other two: the warriors had to defend everyone, the peasants had to feed everyone, and the clergy had to enlighten and bring salvation to everyone. This outlook would persist for nearly a thousand years; when a merchant class reappeared in western Europe, it was seen as part of the peasant class until the Middle Ages were more than halfway over.

As the new system started to work, it grew to encompass every place that had once been part of the Roman Empire, because in those anarchic times people who organized into large groups tended to prevail over those who didn’t. In the interest of preserving peace and order, all free men were advised to find a lord to offer their services to; after a while anyone who claimed to have no lord was likely to be slain on the spot as a common outlaw. Only in places that were totally uncivilized did the idea of equality remain.

The society formed by this fusion of Christianity and the old German system is called feudalism. Basically, it replaced law and money with obligation and tithe. But to those who lived back then it meant a lot more than that, for while the government was only one part of the Roman's life, feudalism, like religion to a fundamentalist, affected every aspect of the medieval man's existence. In a feudal society everyone holds his fief⁽¹⁾ as a tenant, and to keep it one has to give produce, labor, or military service--whichever is appropriate for his station--to his overlord. Yet while he rendered his dues, he could not be evicted from his fief and he could pass it to an heir, so in some ways the fief was his by hereditary right. Thus, we have a complete fusion of commerce and politics in the reciprocal relationship between lord and vassal.⁽²⁾

The landowners were soon subdivided and ranked according to who was lord and vassal to whom, so that the small landowners (usually called knights or barons) owed service to a big landowner, and only the biggest landowners (known as dukes) owed allegiance directly to the king. Also, the military obligation was purely defensive, so if a king wished to attack somebody, he had to attract followers with promises of plunder or titles of nobility. At home, quarrels between dukes were expected and often settled by force, though there was a tendency to request arbitration from the king. A powerful personality at the top could make the whole system run smoothly, but a king's actual power depended on the size of the “royal domain”--the land owned directly by him and his own knights, not land owned by any of the dukes.

The most famous institution of feudalism, knighthood, came about because of the crying need for a well-trained cavalry. We saw in the last chapter that the most dangerous barbarian tribes, like the Huns, used armies made up almost entirely of archers riding ponies, and they were hard to beat because they spent their whole lives in the saddle. Unfortunately, Rome could not afford to maintain a native cavalry that could meet the challenge posed by barbarian cavalry. The Eastern Roman Empire built a cavalry later on, but it was still inferior to that of the barbarians, so the emperors were always looking to hire barbarian horsemen. Among the Germanic tribes, only the Ostrogoths and Lombards used horses much at all. The Parthians had a corps of chainmail-wearing knights as early as the second century B.C.; they succeeded because they could remember the days when they were nomads in Turkmenistan. When the Persians regained control of Iran in the third century A.D., they were aggressive enough to keep the Parthian knight tradition alive, with their Clibanarii. By contrast, the Chinese never could build a good army on horseback, though they had more resources to draw on than any nation to the west, and their barbarian problem (mainly Huns, Turks, Mongols and Manchus) was more persistent. Finally, it wasn't practical for a peasant to raise horses, when he could support his family on the same amount of land needed to feed one horse. A farming community doesn't easily produce mounted soldiers.

It was feudalism that solved the problem of how to raise a cavalry force from a nation of peasants, by gathering everything that was needed in the hands of the nobles. Europe has a wetter climate than North Africa and the Middle East, causing the composite bows used by mounted archers to warp quickly, so it wasn't worth it to give bows to horsemen. Fortunately for them, much of Europe is forest, and that helped to cancel the archer's ability to attack from a distance. What the rulers of post-Roman Europe chose to do instead was create a heavy cavalry. By charging headlong with a lance, the knight could concentrate his weight and the weight of his horse to produce a shock wave powerful enough to break through any other military formation. The knight needed protection from the impact when he put his lance to work, so from the start it was customary to dress knights--and their horses--in the heaviest armor they could get. And it took a big horse to carry a fully armored knight, so the breeding and raising of horses became a more exact science. Western Europe's nobility worked for centuries to develop the culture of the war horse, using much of the continent's wealth to mount, equip and train themselves for the job. The new class of professional riders outlasted the role's usefulness (even today the queen of England bestows knighthood as a gift on those who serve the country well). Heraldic designs that identified a knight in full armor became the insignia of his family. The behavior considered appropriate for a knight became the code of chivalry when poets and writers got hold of it.

In the days of the Roman Empire, the Franks did not wear much armor, and their main weapon was a small axe called a francisca, which they threw like a tomahawk. After the Franks founded their kingdom, they got to wear a loose form of scale armor, and added swords, spears and shields to their armory, but they still fought on foot most of the time, massed together in a legion-style formation. As long as they only had a few of the newfangled knights, they had a hard time stopping mounted raiders. We now credit Charles Martel for creating enough knights in France to turn the situation around, in the eighth century. When Moslems raided southern France, Martel decreed that every landowner in the kingdom would have to contribute enough goods to support one knight, and if he could afford it, support more than one. As a result, he had the cavalry he needed at the battle of Tours, which we will cover later in this chapter. In the ninth and tenth centuries the nations around the Frankish kingdom trained knights of their own, allowing Christian Europe to begin a counteroffensive.

Not all farms were large enough or rich enough to provide horses (a horse cost as much as twenty cattle in those days), so Charles Martel ordered each estate which couldn't afford horses to contribute at least one foot soldier and his equipment. This provided him with an infantry to back up the knights. For the rest of the Middle Ages, knights got all the attention, but they usually made up only one tenth of the available force; most of the men in a medieval European army were the unappreciated infantry, serving jobs that varied from archers to siege engineers to pikemen.

The best thing about feudalism is that it is cheap and does not require a large group of educated “public servants” to make it work. Unfortunately, the justice administered within the framework was not very good, so the peasant depended on the good nature of his lord, and had to hope that he would make an impartial decision, when nothing in the feudal code required him to do so. But the last years of the Roman Empire proved that a legal system can cost more than it is worth, and the feudal system brought considerable relief to poverty-stricken Europe. The Lombards put the rules of feudalism down in writing in the early seventh century, and others did the same after 800, because the system was working fairly well by then.⁽³⁾ However, the emphasis on a hereditary chain of command made feudalism unsuitable for large empires, so the huge one created by Charlemagne couldn't last. What's more, if the king had two or more sons, he was expected to divide his inheritance between them. Finally, the king was likely to be inbred if his dynasty was successful enough to last more than a few generations. These were the closest things feudalism had to a system of checks and balances.

Clovis

Why did the Franks succeed when so many other Germanic peoples failed? The first reason was that their slice of the Roman Empire bordered on Germany. Unlike the other tribes, they had more Germans right behind them, who moved in to join the tribe before there was any danger of success spreading them too thinly. They also were more cautious, only moving into a new part of Belgium or Gaul as they acquired enough people to settle it; the emperors were willing to forgive Frankish raids because they were a minor irritation compared to Gothic and Vandal attacks.

Clovis became king of the Franks in 481, when he was only fifteen years old. At first he was a fine example of a barbarian; brutal, ignorant, and totally amoral, he split skulls, stole treasure, and collected concubines with glee. From his Merovingian father⁽⁴⁾ he inherited the lands between the Rhine and the Somme Rivers, with a rude capital at Tournai. Five years later he overthrew the last Roman general in the West, Syagrius, and annexed his land. This gave him all of Gaul (henceforth known as France) that the other tribes didn’t have already--everything north of the Loire and west of the Rhine. The kingdom of Brittany swore allegiance to Clovis in 497, but neither Clovis nor his successors did much to enforce this submission, so the Bretons were really an independent ally of the Franks. In 496 he defeated the Alamanni, and went on to conquer them in 505.

Most important to the common people of those days was the fact that under Clovis, the Franks became Catholics. All other barbarians were either pagans or Arian Christians, a never-ending source of friction between them and their Catholic subjects. The Catholic bishops of Gaul looked for a barbarian chief who would become their champion, and had a very skimpy selection of candidates to choose from. Thus when Clovis won battle after battle they decided that he was their man, despite his personal life.

Clovis listened to what the bishops had to say with interest, and may have seen the advantages of joining the same faith that the ordinary person practiced; at the very least, he saw the disunity Arianism fostered and stayed away from it. He became an even better listener when he chose a Catholic princess, Clothilde of Burgundy, as his bride. Clovis was encouraged to convert by both the bishops and the queen, but he held out until he fought his first battle against the pagan Alemanni; this was such a close call that Clovis promised to accept baptism if God would give him the victory. He won, and the ceremony was performed at Rheims on Christmas Day of 496, to a garish display of Christian pomp and barbarian militarism, after which 3,000 warriors followed Clovis into the baptismal font.

There is no evidence that Clovis’ spiritual life or moral character improved much after his conversion, but the fact that it happened caused the Romans living under Gothic, Burgundian and Vandal rule to welcome him as a liberator. One Burgundian bishop, Avitus of Vienne, voiced his sympathies boldly in a letter to Clovis congratulating his baptism: “Your faith is our triumph. Every battle you fight is a victory for us.” The other Germanic peoples learned from the example and success of Clovis and gradually switched from Arianism to Catholicism; first the Burgundians (516), then the Visigoths in Spain (589), and finally the Lombards in Italy (653). By this time the other followers of Arianism, the Vandals and the Ostrogoths, had been eliminated by the Eastern Roman Empire, so the seventh century saw the restoration of the Church’s unity.

The wisdom of the choice of Clovis was shown on the battlefield of Vouillé; here in 507 he defeated the Visigoths, killed their king, Alaric II, and almost ran them completely out of France. Theodoric intervened in time to keep the land south of the Garonne (Gascony) as well as the western part of the Riviera (known as Septimania) in Visigoth hands. As for those Visigoths caught on the wrong side of the new border, Clovis allowed them to stay and keep their lands on condition that they be re-baptized as Catholics.

Clovis celebrated his triumph by moving his capital from Soissons to an island in the Seine River--a brilliant location that would remain the capital of France afterwards--Paris.⁽⁵⁾ From far-away Constantinople, Emperor Athanasius was impressed enough to give Clovis the titles of consul and patrician, in effect making him the rightful heir of Syagrius. Because the Empire considered the Franks to be boorish barbarians, and would continue to feel that way for centuries to come, this was praise indeed.

Theodoric the Ostrogoth

Theodoric, the Ostrogoth king, came up with a solution. He didn't like Odoacer either; his father had killed Odoacer's father in an earlier battle, so the two sons were blood enemies. Going west to finish the feud also seemed like the best way to get out of the Empire; Theodoric had served Zeno for many years, but he knew that the citizens of the Empire would never accept him completely because he was a barbarian. Accordingly, he went to Zeno and offered to reconquer Italy for the East. Zeno gladly agreed; sending barbarians to eliminate other barbarians worked perfectly for him, especially if they had to fight to the last man. His predecessor Arcadius, remember, had used the same method to remove the Visigoths at the beginning of the century.

In 489 Theodoric led the Ostrogoths in an invasion of Italy. He conquered most of the country fairly quickly, but Odoacer's forces held out in Ravenna, meaning that three years of the four-year-war were spent in a siege of the Italian capital. In 493 Odoacer made a first-class mistake--he invited Theodoric into Ravenna under a truce, and together they agreed to rule Italy jointly. Theodoric threw a banquet to celebrate, and right after offering a toast, he slew Odoacer with his own sword, cleaving him from the collarbone to the thigh. The force of this blow, which nearly cut Odoacer in two, astonished even Theodoric, who exclaimed, “The wretch cannot have had a bone in his body!” Then Theodoric’s men slaughtered most of Odoacer’s warriors.

Despite this treacherous start, Theodoric ruled as an enlightened monarch for the next 33 years. To treat his subjects as fairly as possible, he governed with two law codes, one for the Romans, the other for barbarians. He continued to employ Romans as administrators under their old titles, repaired seaports and aqueducts, and built a palace with glittering mosaics at Ravenna.⁽⁶⁾ He also made his reign look more legal than Odoacer's by making frequent shows of submission to Constantinople. In one tactful letter, for example, Theodoric told the emperor that “Our royalty is an imitation of yours, a copy of the only empire on earth.”

As we noted previously, Theodoric got involved in the war between the Visigoths and the Franks. First he defeated the Burgundians, who used the Frankish victory to annex the coastland between the Rhone River and the Italian border. This territory, now called Provence, became a part of the Ostrogoth kingdom. In 511 the throne of the demoralized Visigoths became available, and they offered it to Theodoric. This created a truly impressive Gothic empire; Goths now controlled the entire northwestern part of the Mediterranean basin, from Spain to Dalmatia. The prestige they gained was enough to make the Vandals give up the western tip of Sicily without an argument. However, Theodoric did nothing to merge the two governments into one; acting as a regent, he gave the West Gothic crown back when a legitimate heir to it, Amalaric, came of age in 522. After Theodoric's reign ended the Visigoths were completely on their own again. By contrast, the Franks had successfully integrated themselves into Gallo-Roman society, and though Clovis divided the realm between four sons, they were in complete agreement on foreign policy, so outsiders regarded the Frankish kingdom as a single state with four kings.

Underneath all these accomplishments, the foundations of the Ostrogoth kingdom were no more firm than those of most other new German states. As with the Vandals and the Visigoths, Arian ruler and Catholic subject lived in separate communities, each distrusting each other. Also like the other kingdoms, the Ostrogoths weakened rapidly following the death of the kingdom's founder in 526. Amalasuntha, the daughter of Theodoric, became the real ruler, acting as regent for her young son. She sought support from the new emperor of the East, Justinian, and he accepted. But then the son died and an evil cousin, Theodahad, first married Amalasuntha to share power, then murdered her so he could rule alone. That would give Justinian the righteous excuse he needed when he invaded Italy in 535.

Justinian

The Empire was ready to re-enter the arena of international politics when a new dynasty took over in 518. The founder, Justin I, was a young Illyrian peasant who had walked into Constantinople with nothing but a bag of bread; he joined the army and made his fortune over the next fifty years, rising through the ranks. When the throne became vacant, Justin was commander of the palace guards, the only significant armed force in the city; he used that and some gifts of silver to make himself emperor. But by then he was nearly seventy years old, and only had experience in military matters; not even literate, he had to depend on a brilliant nephew, Flavius Petrus Sabbatius, to do the administrative work for him. In return, Sabbatius changed his name to Justinian to make sure everybody knew who his uncle was. Although he did not become the official heir until 526, one year before Justin's death, for most of Justin's nine-year-reign, Justinian appears to have been the real manager of the Empire.

An energetic leader, Justinian (527-565) took a direct interest in any detail of management, no matter how small. He ate little and fasted often, rose early and went to bed late; “the emperor never sleeps” was how one government worker described his activity. However, he still found time to meet with his subjects. Procopius, the unfriendly historian who is our main source of information from this time, admitted that Justinian was “the most accessible person in the world. For even men of low estate and altogether obscure had complete freedom not only to come before him but to converse with him.”

Justinian succeeded in handling a busy schedule because he was superb at attracting individuals more talented than he was, and delegating tasks to them. His inner circle included the best lawyers, bureaucrats, generals, and architects of the day. However, he also had great dreams for the future, and those dreams would cost money. Anastasius and Justin had been frugal spenders, but Justinian was going to need more than what they had saved in the treasury; he spent 3,700 pounds of gold just to celebrate his coronation. Fortunately, his circle of friends included an excellent tax collector, John the Cappadocian. John centralized the tax code, reorganized it so that the rich paid as much as the poor, and was absolutely incorruptible. Although this allowed him to squeeze the proverbial blood out of a turnip, the higher taxes made him enormously unpopular; what's more, he had no personal charm, was a glutton and a drunkard, and had a reputation for torturing those that he suspected were not paying their fair share.

One of Justinian's his first acts as emperor was to organize several judicial commissions to overhaul, rewrite, and make sense out of a thousand years of Roman laws, which often contradicted one another and were not even written down in one place. The lawyer he picked to lead the commissions, Tribonian, was a walking encyclopedia of legal knowledge. Removing the repetitions and contradictions, and changing the laws to make them more compatitble with Christian morals, he produced the first part of the new law code, the Corpus Juris Civilis, in 529, just fourteen months after he got started. This condensation of older laws, also known as the Codex Justinianus, would become the model for the legal code of nearly every European nation afterwards. But for Tribonian this was just the beginning; next he summarized the written statements of Roman lawyers and jurists, to produce the Digesta, a work even larger than the Codex, and wrote a textbook for law students, the Institutiones. Later on a fourth work, the Novellae Constitutiones, covered the laws that were passed after 534, because the other books were completed by then. Altogether he managed to boil down more than two thousand treaties and three million verses into just fifty books, an awesome achievement however you look at it. Unfortunately, the price for all this was having Tribonian on your side, for while he had the social skills that John the Cappadocian lacked, he could be easily bribed to change the law in somebody's favor, and even worse, he was an unashamed pagan. Consequently he soon became the second most hated man in the Empire, after John the Cappadocian.

Perhaps the most important of Justinian’s associates was his wife, Theodora. Theodora is the most famous of the Eastern Roman empresses, because of the gossip passed on to us by Procopius. According to him she was an improbable consort, the daughter of a bear-keeper in the Hippodrome, a prostitute and actress so notorious that people who passed her on the street gave her as much room as possible, so they wouldn’t be associated with her. She attracted Justinian’s attention before he became emperor, and since the law did not allow him to marry a woman of such lowly status, he persuaded his uncle to change the law so that he could. By the time of the marriage, Theodora had changed her ways, and for the rest of her life she backed her husband, in both good times and bad.

Though ruthless and autocratic, Theodora also had her compassionate side. She sheltered a deposed patriarch in her own apartments for twelve years without anyone knowing it. In Constantinople she built hospitals for the poor, and converted an old palace on the banks of the Bosporus into a home for destitute women. When she died of cancer in 548, Justinian lost his most powerful base of support.

Theodora’s best moment came in 532, when a riot in Constantinople's Hippodrome got out of hand. In Chapter 4, we noted that factions formed around the two most popular chariot-racing teams, the Blues and the Greens. Like today's British soccer fans, fans of the races were notoriously rowdy, and now they were seething, thanks to what John the Cappadocian and Tribonian had done. Justinian had several members of both gangs executed for the murders that had been committed in the riot, but when two of them were to be hanged, a Blue and a Green, the ropes broke, and they escaped to a church, where they were protected by an angry mob. An attempt by Justinian to calm tempers by calling a new race, where he personally addressed the fans, only resulted in all of them turning against him; he fled to the palace, and the crowds broke out of the Hippodrome, whereupon they began burning down much of Constantinople. Many citizens left the city to escape rioters who shouted “Nika!” (“Destroy!”), and Justinian considered doing the same. Theodora was the only one who stood firm, and said:

“If flight were the only means of safety, yet I should disdain to fly. Death is the condition of our birth, but they who have reigned should never suffer the loss of dignity and dominion. I implore Heaven that I may never be seen, not a day, without my diadem and purple; that I may no longer behold the light when I cease to be saluted with the name of queen. If you resolve, O Caesar, to fly, you have treasures; behold the sea, you have ships; but tremble lest the desire of life should expose you to wretched exile and ignominious death. For my own part, I prefer the old saying that the imperial purple makes the best burial sheet!”

Justinian stayed and sent the city guards into the Hippodrome, which killed 30,000 rioters and quickly crushed the rebellion. The riots had destroyed the Senate chamber, the public baths, churches, and part of the the palace, but for Justinian, this was really a signal to begin one of his projects; he responded with the largest building program the Empire had seen since Constantine I.⁽⁷⁾

Like several previous emperors, both pagan and Christian, Justinian felt that spiritual unity was as important as political unity. To start with, in 529 he closed the Neo-platonist university in Athens, paganism’s last stronghold. Far more disruptive, though, was the Church’s internal enemy--heresy. Egypt and Syria were hotbeds of Monophysitism, a doctrine which taught that Christ’s godly nature was so dominant that His human side was unimportant. Since Theodora had Monophysite leanings, and these provinces were critical to the Empire's defense, Justinian tried to reach an agreement with the heretics. However, Monophysitism had been condemned by the Church Council of Chalcedon (451), so the pope refused to accept any compromise. The result was vacillation; sometimes Justinian made concessions to the Monophysites, sometimes he made concessions to the pope. Because the Egyptians and the Syrians were left unsatisfied by this policy, the next century would see them welcome invasions from the Empire's enemies: first the Persians, and later the Arabs.

Justinian's Campaigns

Justinian first sent Belisarius against the Vandals (533). He gave him 16,000 men, 1/3 of them cavalry; because the Vandals had defeated an army six times larger in 468, they wouldn't have been scared of this army--had they known it was coming. After pausing at Sicily with the consent of the Ostrogoths, the expedition sailed to Africa and completely surprised the enemy. Half the Vandal army was dealing with a revolt in Sardinia; the half still at home was scattered by Belisarius outside of Carthage, and he took the Vandal capital. When the other half of the army came back from Sardinia he annihilated it, too. The Vandal king first hid in the Atlas Mts., and then surrendered a year later, and after Belisarius captured the Vandal treasury at Hippo Regius, St. Augustine's city, he returned to Constantinople.

In the days of the Roman Republic, it had been customary to give a lavish victory parade, a "triumph," to a conquering hero. Roman armies hadn't conquered much in the past four hundred years, so when Justinian decided to honor Belisarius with a triumph, it was the first that the Romans had seen in centuries. Belisarius led the procession, riding in a chariot, followed by the Vandal king and other important prisoners, and the treasures he brought back were prominently displayed. Among those treasures was a seven-branched candlestick, reportedly the menorah from Herod's Temple in Jerusalem. It had been a war trophy for the Roman emperor Titus in 70 A.D., and for the Vandal king Gaiseric in 455; now it became Justinian's prize.⁽⁸⁾ However, this would also be the last triumph in Roman history.

In 535 Justinian sent Belisarius west again, this time to fight the Ostrogoths. Though the Ostrogoths were not in much better shape than the Vandals, Justinian was now overextended; he could only give Belisarius 9,000 soldiers for this expedition, so at first he only asked the general to capture Sicily. Belisarius got off to a flying start; the only fighting he had to do on Sicily was at Palermo, so both he and Justinian agreed to go for more. A mutiny in the North African garrison required his attention first, though, and by the time Belisarius took care of that, the campaigning season was over for 535, to he had to wait until the spring of 536 to move to the Italian mainland. When he arrived, he had his way again, meeting no effective opposition until he reached Naples. The siege of Naples took only three weeks, and one month later (December 536), cheering crowds welcomed Belisarius into Rome.⁽⁹⁾

The citizens would not have cheered so much if they had known what Belisarius was planning. The king of the Ostrogoths, who had previously been absent from the war, was finally coming, so Belisarius decided to sit tight, leaving the next move to his opponent. However, this wasn't Theodahad, who had been king when the war started. Theodahad had concentrated all his efforts on defending Dalmatia from a Roman army in the Balkans, to the point that he did nothing to help Naples. His refusal to meet the main enemy in battle was unacceptable behavior for a German king; the Ostogoths deposed him and crowned Witigis, a son-in-law of the late Amalasuntha. Witigis didn't have time to defend Rome, because Belisarius moved too quickly, but after Rome fell, he showed up with a huge Gothic army. By then the Romans had repaired the city wall, forcing the Goths to try a siege.⁽¹⁰⁾

The siege lasted for fourteen months. Witigis cut off Rome's water supply, which still came in through the aqueducts, but that caused a malaria outbreak in his own camp. Then Belisarius remembered how he had used empty aqueducts to sneak his troops into Naples, so he blocked the Roman conduits with masonry before the Ostrogoths could try the same trick. To protect his infantry, Belisarius used the northern semicircle of the city wall the same way he had used his trenches against the Persians. Whenever a Gothic unit got separated from the rest of the enemy, he sent out the cavalry to carve it up. As the siege dragged on, the Ostrogoths suffered more than the Romans, because they were exposed to the elements, and had to travel farther and farther to forage for food. In addition, Rome was too big for the attacking army to encircle, so the reinforcements sent by Constantinople were able to get through. By early 538, the Ostrogoths had been worn down to the point that they did not want to fight anymore. When two thousand Roman horsemen broke out, charged deep behind enemy lines and captured Ariminum (modern Rimini), a port only thirty-three miles south of Ravenna, Witigis gave the order to withdraw to his capital, and Belisarius went on the offensive again.

Belisarius did not march on Ravenna right away; his first target after Rome was Ancona, on the Adriatic coast. Meanwhile in the northwest, the archbishop of Mediolanum (modern Milan) called on Belisarius to liberate his city. A thousand soldiers were detached to do this, but on the way seven other cities and forts also opened their gates to the Romans, and each of them needed a garrison, so that left only three hundred men for Mediolanum. At this point, jealousy back in Constantinople began to undermine the war effort. Belisarius was getting too successful, too popular; he was now the type of person who could sieze the throne for himself. And because he was young, he could wait a long time for the right opportunity. Empress Theodora trusted no potential rival of her husband, so the next time reinforcements went to Italy, they were led by another general, an Armenian eunuch named Narses. Because of his condition, Narses was not a threat to the emperor, and because he was in his sixties, he looked more frail than he really was.

Narses arrived to find Rimini besieged, and Belisarius in a bad mood. He had ordered the two thousand cavalry in Rimini to withdraw before the Ostrogoths tried to take the city back, and John, their commander, flat-out refused to obey that order. Belisarius and most of his officers felt that John deserved whatever happened to him, but Narses declared that the Empire could not afford to lose the men in Rimini, because they were its best soldiers. Narses had the better argument, so Belisarius launched a rescue mission; Witigis abandoned the siege without fighting the relief force, and John made relations between the commanders worse when he gave credit for the bloodless rescue to Narses, not Belisarius. Soon the army was divided between those loyal to Belisarius and those loyal to Narses. When Witigis besieged and took Milan in 539, no help came for the defenders, because each faction of the army was too small by itself to do anything. Eventually Constantinople realized it had been a mistake to split the army, and recalled Narses.

Now Belisarius had a free hand to go for Ravenna. The two divisions of the army in Italy surrounded the Ostrogoth capital, a Roman fleet in the Adriatic cut off access to Ravenna by sea, and a third army from Dalmatia came around the Adriatic and attacked from the north. Witigis decided to play the foreign card; he wrote the Persians, urging King Khosrau I to break the treaty he had signed eight years earlier. Khosrau responded by invading Syria and sacking Antioch, but that didn't relieve the pressure on the dispirited Goths. In 540 King Witigis surrendered himself and his capital, and Belisarius went home with another captive monarch. A thousand Ostrogoth warriors and a few towns remained in the Po valley, but it looked like a simple mopping up operation would take care of them; Belisarius was now needed on the Persian front again.

In the east, Belisarius chased the Persians out of Syria quickly enough, but before he could retaliate with an attack on Persian territory, disaster struck. It was a terrible disease, the first recorded outbreak of bubonic plague. We know less about this outbreak, henceforth known as "Justinian's plague," than we do about the Black Death, the more famous outbreak of the fourteenth century, because it was further in the past and we have fewer records, but the effect appears to have been the same. Appearing in Egypt in 541 (see Chapter 4 of my African history), it quickly spread to both the Roman and Persian Empires. Because it was the largest city in the known world, Constantinople was hit hardest of all. There 300,000 died, out of a population of 750,000; at one point the city was losing ten thousand a day, and undertakers got so far behind in burying the dead that corpses were stacked floor to ceiling in an abandoned fort. Equally bad was the effect on the economy. Crops went unharvested and shops were understaffed, meaning that the next few years would see famine and a slump in business. On the war front, both Romans and Persians had to call time out until 544.

Justinian himself caught the plague, and because Theodora was childless, she could only hope to keep her position if she married whomever became emperor next. However, the generals got together and acted as if Justinian was already dead, declaring that they would only support their own candidate, whether Theodora liked it or not. Then unexpectedly, Justinian began to recover (somebody in Heaven must have thought that the world would be worse off with Theodora but not Justinian). Regaining her confidence, Theodora had revenge on the disloyal generals. One was locked up until, according to the words of one historian, "he emerged more shadow than a man." Belisarius had also been at that meeting, but he was too popular to be sent to jail. Instead he was accused of keeping too much loot from the African campaign, and stripped of his command; his household staff was dismissed, and all his treasure was confiscated. He remained in disgrace until bad news from Italy forced Justinian and Theodora to call him back and give him another chance, but they never fully trusted him again.

In Italy, the plague and the absence of Roman leadership allowed an eleventh-hour rally for the Ostrogoths. At Pavia they elected a new king named Totila, the nephew of Witigis, in 541. Totila accepted the fact that this was a battle to the death, so he burned his bridges behind him with two gestures of defiance against the Empire. First he minted coins which treasonably showed him dressed in imperial costume; next, he dismissed the Roman Senate, which had long outlived its usefulness but was still a symbol of Roman authority. To the people of Italy, he portrayed himself as a champion of the middle and lower classes, pointing out that taxes had increased since the Romans returned, and that much of the money the Romans took went to build palaces in Constantinople or to pay off distant barbarians--things that meant nothing to Italians. He also talked about abolishing both slavery and feudalism, an act that was sure to upset landowners and please everybody else. His populist message was so attractive that it even won over some of the soldiers in the Roman camp. Then he restored Ostrogoth morale with a series of successful offensives, which recovered most of the peninsula by the fall of 542; he took Naples in May 543.

In 544 Belisarius returned to Italy and found Roman rule disintegrating everywhere. This time he had with him a mere 4,000 men, and with an army that small there was little he could do but repeat his old defensive strategy. Much of his time was spent writing Justinian, asking for reinforcements and wryly remarking that even he needed men to get things done. The commander of the garrison in Rome surrendered to Totila in 546; Belisarius retook Rome in 547, but it wasn't good enough for Constantinople. Justinian recalled Belisarius in 548, and Rome fell to the Ostrogoths again a year later. By 551 the Empire had nothing left in Italy but Ravenna and Ancona, and Gothic ships were raiding Sicily, Sardinia, and even the Balkan coast.

It took until 552 for Justinian to scrape up a new army strong enough to face the Goths, and find a suitable leader for it. Sick of the politics and that had ruined his opportunities, Belisarius had retired after his recall, so the aged Narses was put in command, and was promised whatever reinforcements he might need. Narses had lost Milan the last time he was in Italy, but he turned out to be a good choice; his administrative skills served as a substitute for the tactical genius Belisarius had. Marching through the Balkans, Narses collected more soldiers from tribes like the Lombards⁽¹¹⁾, Heruli and Bulgars. Now leading 35,000 troops, he proceeded around the head of the Adriatic to Ravenna, and then marched on Rome. At Busta Gallorum on the Via Flaminia (the main road through the Apennines) Goth and Roman met for what both sides recognized would be the decisive battle of the long war.

The result was a complete victory for the Romans. The attacking Goths were pinned down by the Roman center and destroyed by the fire of the bowmen Narses massed on the flanks. Totila was among the Gothic dead. In the next year Narses killed Teia, the last Ostrogoth king, as he made a vain attempt to break the Roman siege around Cumae (near Naples). A few Goths held out in the north a bit longer, and the Franks launched an unsuccessful invasion of Italy, but the restoration of Roman power now proceeded steadily. For all practical purposes, after 554, all of Italy was back in the Empire.⁽¹²⁾

Besides Africa and Italy, there was much more. At the same time Justinian managed to keep the Persians away, though Khosrau I was their greatest king. In 552 a civil war among the Visigoths allowed him to send a small expedition which easily won a quarter of Spain. And by conquering the Vandals he gained control over the islands between Italy and Spain: Sardinia, Corsica, and the Balearic Islands. In 559 the Kutrigur Huns, led by a king named Zabergan, crossed the Danube River to raid the Empire's Balkan provinces and threaten Constantinople. There weren't any troops available to defend the capital, so Justinian called Belisarius out of retirement, and the general recruited and trained a tiny rag-tag force, which defeated the Huns until Justinian could end the fighting by paying another Hunnish tribe, the Utigur Huns, to attack their rivals. The final score: Justinian held the entire East and reconquered 45 percent of the West.

Whether it was worth the effort was questionable. Procopius thought not. He closed his account of the African wars with this sentence: “So it came about that those of the Africans who survived, few as they were in number and exceedingly poor, at last and after great trial, found some peace.” Society had collapsed in the Western provinces long before Justinian arrived; disease and urban decay had depopulated Italy to the point that when the Lombards took over a few years later, their historians asserted that they found the country a virtual desert. After Italy was pacified, the emperor launched no more campaigns, because he didn't have the money or the manpower for them. Nor did the lives of the provincials get better after the fighting ended. In North Africa, constant efforts failed to prevent Berber tribes from moving in between the cities. The result was that the recovered lands could not contribute anything toward the upkeep of the Empire; their main value came from the prestige they added, and the restoration of imperial dignity and confidence that came with their conquest.

Avars, Lombards, and Slavs on the Move

Justinian didn't have any children (but Theodora had two illegitimate daughters before they got married, if the information supplied by Procopius is accurate), so the imperial crown went to Justinian's nephew Justin. He inherited a country weakened by plague, and a drained treasury from the long war in Italy, but conditions were stable at home and Justinian had signed a peace treaty with the Persians in 562, so everything would be all right if the Empire had some time to recover. Instead Justin II foolishly irritated the Avars, who up until now had been more interested in raiding their German neighbors to the west--the Saxons, Franks and Bavarians.

The trouble between the Empire and the Avars started over Sirmium (modern Sremska Mitrovica), a town just west of Belgrade. Sirmium had been an important frontier outpost in the third century, the headquarters of the Roman legions guarding the Danube. More recently the Gepids had it and the emperors wanted it back, so when the Lombards destroyed the Gepids, Justin moved in to take Sirmium.

Bayan (565-602), the great khan of the Avars, now lorded over the same land that had once belonged to the Huns--everything between the Danube and the Volga. Instead of going for Sirmium right away, he bided his time until the Empire suffered a defeat in a new Persian war (573), and then he took his vengeance on the Balkan provinces. Justin had a nervous breakdown when he heard the bad news from Persia, and his wife, Sophia, persuaded him to turn over most of his duties to Tiberius, the captain of the guard. Tiberius made peace in time to save Sirmium, but the Avars tried again in 582. This time Bayan captured Sirmium, and the Romans, fully occupied by the Persian war, were forced to buy him off with a fortune in gold coins. Attila would have been proud.

Less than a year after their war with the Gepids, the Lombards invaded Italy (568). They had been there before, having gotten a tour of the peninsula when they marched with Narses’ army fifteen years earlier. Now that they had the Avars for neighbors, the situation at home was becoming very uncomfortable, so Alboin decided that it would be better to move to Italy and leave Hungary to the Avars.

He was right. As governor of Italy, Narses had devoted too much time to enriching himself, until Constantinople felt compelled to dismiss him. His successor, Longinus, had just arrived and did not have the soldiers needed to deal with an armed invasion. Thus, when the Lombards crossed the Alps, they became masters of nearly the entire Po River valley without a battle. This became the heart of their kingdom, and it has been called Lombardy ever since; Pavia, the last capital of the Ostrogoths, now became the Lombard king's capital. All the Romans could do was lock themselves up in their towns and hope that the invaders would run out of food before they did. On the coast this worked; the Romans still had command of the sea and could bring in supplies by ship, but inland the result was a disaster; when the Lombards moved south they quickly conquered more than half the interior. The result was a peculiar division in which the Romans retained control over Genoa, Sipontum, Naples, the heel & toe of the Italian “boot⁽¹³⁾,” and a zigzag corridor that ran from Rome to Venice.⁽¹⁴⁾

Alboin did not get to enjoy his triumph for long. In 572 he offended Rosamund at a party by forcing her to drink wine from her father's skull. Afterwards she organized a conspiracy that murdered Alboin, but she could not keep the throne, and soon she and her lover sought refuge in Ravenna. In 574 the one who got the throne, Cleph, also fell victim to an assassination, and for the next ten years the Lombards had no king at all; during this time the emperors paid the Lombard dukes with gold to keep Italy in a state of anarchy.

After the Lombards got a king again, some hostilities took place, but the balance of power between Roman and Lombard lasted for more than century. In fact, the only changes before the year 700 were the Lombard conquests of Genoa and part of the heel of the peninsula. The Lombards failed to complete their conquest of Italy because the king had to spend most of his time keeping the dukes in line.

There were about thirty dukes. The two in the south--the dukes of Spoleto and Benevento--had deliberately left the central Italian corridor in Roman hands so that the Lombard king could not get at them. In fact, the Duchy of Benevento outlasted the rest of the kingdom, precisely because of that corridor. Five dukes in the north--those of Milan, Bergamo, Brescia, Trent, and Friuli--were strong enough to do pretty much as they liked, no matter what the king said.

There was little, if any, resistance to the Lombards from the civilian population. Justinian was the last Roman emperor who spoke Latin as his first language. Most of the “Roman” administrators and troops he sent spoke Greek, and they treated the Italians more like subjugated foreigners than liberated countrymen. When Totila retook Naples in 543, he fed the starving, and protected women and even captured enemy soldiers from abuse, whereas Belisarius had celebrated his triumph in that city seven years before with a general massacre. Few Italians could have been happy to see the Lombards come, but at the same time few were sorry to see the Easterners leave. Time had mutual suffering had done a lot to make the Western Romans accept the Germans.

As Roman control over the peninsula faded, the pope tried to step in (more about that below), but by himself he wasn't strong enough to take the emperor's place. This encouraged the Lombards, who were under their greatest king, Liutprand (712-744), in the early eighth century. By declaring himself a champion of the Church's images when the Iconoclastic Controversy began, Liutprand gained an excuse to conquer several cities which had previously remained in Roman hands, especially Bologna and the east coast from Rimini to Ancona. He even captured and briefly held Ravenna, but gave it back in return for the emperor's support, when he marched against Benevento and Spoleto (eventually he replaced their rebellious dukes with members of his own family). For the pope he granted Sutri, a town 30 miles from Rome, and the land surrounding it, in 728. The "Donation of Sutri" was the first land outside Rome's immediate neighborhood ruled directly by the pope, and it marks the beginning of the Papal State that dominated central Italy for the next thousand years. For affairs outside of Italy, Liutprand allied himself with Charles Martel, and in 736-737 he led a campaign across the Alps to help Charles drive the Moors out of southern France.

The Lombards were not the only people who moved because of Avar activity. Since the fifth century the Slavs had been steadily expanding in all directions, from their original home around the Pripet Marshes (see Chapter 1). Most of that expansion had taken place while they were under the Huns and the Avars, so it did not become visible until they regained their independence in the early seventh century. To the west, Hun and Avar attacks had driven the Germans back; the Bavarians abandoned Bohemia, while the Saxons and Franks withdrew to the Elbe River. More vacant areas appeared every time a German tribe left to take its chances in the Roman Empire, and often the Slavs were right behind them to fill up those vacuums. In was a slow but steady advance, less glorious than the furious charges and volkwanderungs of other tribes, but more successful in the long run. To the south, the Romans held the lower Danube, which remained theirs until the Bulgars arrived in the late seventh century, but several Slav tribes were able to cross the middle Danube and settle in Illyria, becoming the South Slavs or “Yugo-Slavs” of today.

Back in Constantinople, Justin II died in 578. Like several previous emperors, Justin was childless, so Tiberius succeeded him; he soon proved to be quite popular because he was handsome and a big spender. To keep people from associating him with the first emperor named Tiberius (see Chapter 4), he called himself Tiberius Constantine; modern historians simply call him Tiberius II. Apparently the former empress Sophia elevated him with the idea that she could control him if he married her, but Tiberius refused to abandon the wife he had already, so that ended Sophia's career in politics. Late in 582 he fell ill, and on the day before his death he crowned Maurice, the general commanding the Persian front, as his successor.

Maurice managed to hold onto the throne for twenty years (582-602); nearly half of that time was spent fighting Persia, but Maurice eventually brought the war to a successful conclusion. During a truce in the winter of 586-587, the Persians sent the Katholikos, the leader of the Nestorian Church, to Maurice. He gave the emperor a creed, which he had checked out by the Patriarch; the Patriarch declared it orthodox and without error. After that he no longer had reason to view the Christians within the Persian Empire as heretics, so religion ceased to be the main reason behind wars with Persia; now only the Monophysites opposed the Empire for religious reasons. Then in 590 came a stroke of luck; the Persian king died and Khosrau II, the crown prince, fled to the Romans. Maurice gave Khosrau his daughter Mary and sent him home with an army to regain his throne. Khosrau paid him back by giving up Iberia (northern Azerbaijan) and most of Armenia. Now Roman troops could be transferred from Asia to Europe, to restore the Danube defenses and even cross the Danube to teach the Avars a lesson.

Heraclius

The three emperors before Maurice had spent too much, so Maurice tried to reduce spending whenever he could. Unfortunately his subjects considered him tightfisted because of that. One of those cost-cutting measures was an order to the soldiers fighting the Avars; because food was in short supply in Constantinople, they would have to spend the winter of 602 on the far side of the Danube, living off the land. Instead of obeying, the soldiers revolted, marched on Constantinople, killed Maurice, and crowned one of their own officers, Phocas.

This despicable act marked the beginning of eight years of catastrophes. To no one's surprise, the Avars used this coup as an excuse to devastate the Balkans. Less expected was a vast forward movement by the Slavs, who followed the Avars and settled the whole interior of the Balkans. The Romans were forced to abandon all of Illyria except the province of Dalmatia, and even that was shrinking fast; within a few years “Dalmatia” was just three or four towns on the Adriatic coast. From 587 to 805, the Slavs even ruled part of the Peloponnesus, in southern Greece. At the same time, Khosrau II of Persia, who had learned from Maurice how to take advantage of dynastic strife, declared that he would avenge his late father-in-law. The war that he began in 603 was no unimaginative border conflict, but an attempt to restore the great Achaemenid Persian Empire of classical times. Phocas was forced to forget about the Balkans, and transfer most of the troops he had to the Persian front.

For Phocas, the worst news was the reaction of the army. Many commanders would not accept a usurper like Phocas as emperor, because he had destroyed all sense of legitimate rule; Phocas was the first eastern emperor since Constantine I who could not use blood, marriage or service to link himself with his predecessor. The governor of Carthage, Heraclius, agreed with them, and launched a revolt in North Africa. However, Heraclius was too old for the top job, so he nominated his son, also named Heraclius, as a more sensible alternative to Phocas. First the rebels cut off the North African grain shipments to Constantinople, then they sent an army to capture the other major breadbasket, Egypt. It took all 608 and 609 for them to prevail here, because Phocas withdrew the army of the East from the Persian front and sent it into Egypt. It was a dangerous gamble, and Phocas lost; not only did he fail to stop the rebellion, despite extremely heavy fighting in Egypt, but Khosrau had no trouble with the local militias who were supposed to hold the border forts until the main army came back. By 610, all of Roman Mesopotamia was in Persian hands, Armenia was abandoned, and the Persians raided Cappadocia, putting them within reach of Constantinople.

Phocas was now so unpopular that the elder Heraclius confidently launched stage three of the rebellion, sending his son directly to Constantinople by ship. Phocas tried to defend Constantinople by enlisting the two factions of chariot-racing fans, the Blues and the Greens, but the Greens went over to Heraclius, and the Blues were more interested in beating up the Greens. The younger Heraclius got there without incident, stepping ashore to a thunderous welcome from a hungry crowd. Phocas was arrested in a palace church, and brought to the ship of Heraclius, who asked, "Is this how you have ruled, wretch?" Phocas defiantly replied, "And will you rule better?", prompting Heraclius to kill and behead him on the spot. Phocas's body was then dismembered and burned.

Almost anybody could have done better, after such a disastrous reign, but Phocas had a point; the Empire was on the verge of collapse. It was under attack on several fronts from Avars, Slavs, Lombards, Visigoths and Persians. The army of Illyria had disintegrated, while the army of the East was pushed back to the Taurus mts., after losing Syria (611-613), Israel (614) and Egypt (619) to the Persians. Meanwhile in the west, the last part of imperial Spain fell to the Visigoths (621). No troops could be spared from elsewhere to turn back the invaders, food ran out after Egypt and Thrace were lost, and there was no money in the treasury.

Heraclius saw that the Empire had two assets left that he could use--the Roman navy and Asia Minor. In Asia Minor were twenty loyal provinces, which had to maintain the armies, and must be defended at all cost. North Africa was too far away for its men and resources to help, and except for the capital, Europe was written off. The Thracian command was broken up and its units transferred to the army of the East. This left three armies: the Guard in Constantinople and the Armenian and Eastern forces on the Persian front. Each was given half a dozen provinces in Asia Minor as its area of responsibility and as a source of recruits and supplies. Then the government experimented with a form of feudalism, by placing groups of peasants on state land and charging them with payments of military service instead of rent. Now the struggle could be sustained even while the imperial treasury remained empty.⁽¹⁵⁾

The new districts each army served in were known as “themes,” from the Greek word for an army command. Shortly after the creation of the themes the old provinces were abolished, and with them the civilian administration. Because the theme system worked so well in Asia Minor, what was left of the Empire in Europe was reorganized into three more themes by 700: Thrace, Greece and Sicily. The post-Heraclian empire was ruled by generals (strategoi).

Heraclius was the most charismatic ruler the Eastern Roman Empire ever had. It shows in how his subjects patiently waited twelve years, while he raised an army for a counterattack and scrounged enough money to pay for it. The Persians had carried away from Jerusalem the True Cross on which Christ was crucified, so Heraclius called this a holy war, promising to lead the army personally against the pagan fire-worshippers, until he got the Cross back. This meant he had to study manuals on strategy and tactics before he could go forth; he was the first emperor in two centuries to go with his men into battle. Leaving the capital in the care of the Patriarch Sergius and a general named Bonus, he kept morale high by constantly writing letters with instructions on the tiniest details of defense.

Instead of using his last army in wasteful attempts to take back the lost provinces, he transported it by sea to Cilicia, struck north through Armenia, picked up some support from the Khazars, a Turkic tribe on the north slopes of the Caucasus, and looked for a weak spot in the defenses of the Persian homeland. Meanwhile to the west, the Persians struck at the enemy homeland, too; one of their armies got into Asia Minor, maneuvered its way around the themes, and reached Chalcedon, on the eastern shore of the Bosporus (626). What made this really alarming to the Romans was that the Avars attacked Constantinople from land at the same time, and they planned to ferry Persian soldiers over to the European side in rowboats. Fortunately, their last lines of defense didn't fail them. Again the walls of Constantinople stood firm, not yielding to the siege engines of the Avars. Every day Patriarch Sergius led a parade on top of the walls with an icon of the Virgin Mary, convincing the defenders that God was protecting them, and that the icon struck terror into the hearts of the attackers. Even more important, the Roman navy still ruled the sea, preventing the Empire's enemies from joining forces on the last mile of water between them. Sorties from the navy destroyed the Avar ships, and eventually forced the Avars to withdraw.

A year after the successful defense of Constantinople, Heraclius descended onto the plains of northern Iraq. He won a convincing victory at the ruins of ancient Nineveh, which unraveled the Persians and brought a sudden end to the long war; Khosrau was deposed and murdered by his nobles, and they sued for peace. The treaty ending the war restored the prewar boundary between the two empires. The True Cross was returned, and Heraclius took it first to Constantinople, and then back to Jerusalem.

In the Balkans, the failure of the Avars to take Constantinople marked the end of their glory days. The Slavic tribes under their rule became completely independent within a few years after 626, and although the Avars hung around until the end of the eighth century, most of them were confined to Hungary and Transylvania. Another Avar group, on the plain between the Black and Caspian Seas, has managed to last until the present day. A Frankish merchant named Samo established the first Slavic kingdom in Bohemia in 623, defeated an Avar attempt to regain control, and ruled over it until his death in 658 or 659.

After the last Roman-Persian war, Heraclius completely overhauled the legal system. Changes were definitely overdue. For a start, Latin and Greek were still the two official languages of the court, though Latin was no longer in daily use. The Empire still called itself “Roman,” when in fact it had become a Christian version of Alexander’s Greek empire. Consequently, the emperors after this stopped using Latin titles like Imperator, Caesar and Augustus, preferring to call themselves Basileus, which was simply Greek for "king." Historians mark the reforms of Heraclius by calling the Empire “Byzantine” after this, rather than “Roman,” Byzantium being the original name for Constantinople. However, we must remember that this is a modern term. The Byzantines never called themselves by that name, and continued to call themselves Romans all the way to the end of their empire's history. These medieval Greeks used an equally inaccurate term for the people of western Europe, calling them all Franks.

The exhaustion suffered by the Byzantine and Persian empires from their long and fruitless war left them vulnerable to attack from an unexpected direction. Until now, the nomads of Arabia had never been more of a nuisance; both empires prevented raids by paying a subsidy to the nearest tribes, counting on them to make sure the others behaved. All that changed in the early seventh century, because while the Byzantines and Persians were fighting, the Prophet Mohammed appeared, rejected the combination of pagan, Jewish and Christian practices that passed for a religion among the Arabs, and imposed Islam in its place. By the time of his death in 632, Arabia was united, and soon after that, the Arabs boiled out of the desert, intent on conquering the rest of the world for Islam. Heraclius had to watch while the provinces he had so painfully won back were lost again. The next four years saw the Arabs conquer Syria, Iraq and the Holy Land, cutting through larger imperial armies like a knife through butter. In Italy, the Lombards took Genoa (640), a reminder that not all of the Empire's enemies were in the east.

If Heraclius felt that his life's work had been in vain, it was because he had lived too long. Had he died around 630, after the last Perso-Roman War but before the first Arab invasion, he would have been remembered as the greatest emperor after Justinian. When he presided over the ceremonies marking the return of the True Cross, observers noted that his shoulders were stooped, and that his curly, blond hair was now grey and mostly gone; the long war had worn him out, just as it had worn out the Empire. His first wife, Eudocia, was beautiful and extremely popular, but she died early in his reign, and while she would have been a hard act to follow, the emperor responded by marrying his niece Martina, an act of incest that was guaranteed to offend the public. Elsewhere I have written about what inbreeding can do to a family, and it happened here; Heraclius and Martina had ten children, but four died in infancy, one had a paralyzed neck and one was a deaf-mute. The Church had to ignore this scandal while Constantinople was in jeopardy, but after the war ended everyone felt that the misfortunes of Heraclius were God's punishment for an illegal and immoral marriage.

In pain and obviously ailing, Heraclius lost all confidence; when he returned home in 639, after an unsuccessful attempt to defend Syria, he suddenly became afraid of water, and refused to cross the Bosporus. The fear-stricken emperor stayed in Chalcedon for a year, and only crossed to Constantinople when a pontoon bridge was constructed and covered with foliage to hide the water, allowing him to gain control over his terror. His last years were spent trying to resolve the dispute over the nature of Christ (see below), and also saw a quarrel over whether a son of Eudocia or a son of Martina would be his heir. Just before his death in February 641, news reached him of a successful Arab invasion of Egypt. At the end, he probably felt there was no more hope for the Empire than there was for him, but at least he had something to give his successors. His Persian counterpart, Yazdagird III, wasn’t so fortunate; the Arabs overran his country completely.

Heraclius wanted Heracleonas, a son of his and Martina who had been born in Georgia during the campaign against the Persians, to be his heir, but Constantine III, the eldest son of Heraclius and Eudocia, was much more popular, so when Heraclius died, Constantine and Heracleonas were crowned co-emperors. Constantine, however, was already sick from tuberculosis, so he sent a letter and more than a little money to the army, telling them to back his son, Constans II. Sure enough, Constantine died after a reign of three months, and a top general persuaded Heracleonas to accept Constans as another co-emperor. But this didn't squelch rumors that Constantine had been poisoned, and in September 641 a revolt toppled Heracleonas and his mother, and they were mutilated (Martina's tongue was cut off and Heracleonas lost his nose) and banished to a monastery on Rhodes. Thus, only seven months after Heraclius passed on, his eleven-year-old grandson was sole ruler.

The Byzantine Way

To start with, it was full of symbolism. If God brought order to the universe, then the emperor must do the same on earth. Thus human government was made to imitate divine government, and everything the emperor did in public was surrounded with ceremony. Moreover, anything associated with the emperor--his throne, crown, vestments, palace, court, statues/portraits, and even his daily schedule--was full of symbols to remind people that he was God’s appointed governor on earth.

Yet while the emperor’s court was made to look heavenly, in practice it was full of intrigue and treachery. In fact, because of that, we now use the term “Byzantine” to describe a government where webs of conspiracy are commonplace. Because there were no absolute laws to decide who was a legitimate candidate for emperor, many people tried to claim the throne for themselves. The Byzantines felt that God chose their emperors, but the only way they had to determine what God’s will might be was to look and see who happened to be emperor. Thus any means used to seize power was okay--but only if it was successful. A would-be ruler who tried and failed was considered an enemy of God, and could not expect forgiveness. Likewise, a deposed emperor was seen as having fallen out of God’s favor, and ahead of him was a fate just as ghastly as if he was an unsuccessful usurper. Of the 88 emperors who ruled Byzantium from the fourth to the fifteenth century, 29 met violent deaths. Another 13 took refuge in monasteries when they were deposed, and often spent the rest of their lives there.

The empress had a private court in the women’s quarters of the palace, from which she held audiences and banquets of her own, and gave out gifts to retainers and visitors. Some empresses, like the aforementioned Theodora, became famous for certain idiosyncrasies. One such was Zoe, who came out of obscurity when her husband, Constantine VIII, died in 1028. Though already fifty years old, she still had the blond hair and good looks of youth, so she set out to use her charms and prolong them by any means possible. She turned her apartments into a laboratory full of pipes, braziers, and other tools of alchemy. Thus she kept her face free of wrinkles until she was in her sixties, and married three husbands in succession, making each a legitimate ruler through marriage. Only in her final years did she spend as much time in devotions and prayer as she had once spent on chemicals; when she died in 1050, she was 72 and still beautiful.

The Byzantines were not a warlike people, but they were forced to keep a standing army to defend themselves against many enemies. This army, which at its peak numbered 120,000 men, was expensive to maintain, so they looked for anything which might reduce the loss of lives or equipment. Consequently, they zealously pursued diplomacy, and always tried using it before they called out the armed forces. Byzantine diplomacy was a fine art and full of skullduggery at the same time. Typically, the emperor would awe a neighboring state with formal receptions and marvelous gifts, and honor treaty obligations as a good Christian monarch should, but at the same time he would undermine that state by giving money and arms to its enemies and encouraging them to attack. Another popular tactic was to befriend a foreign ruler with a political marriage, or give shelter to some king or queen in exile until a coup could be arranged to put them back on their thrones (and afterwards a regular subsidy from Constantinople would keep them friendly).

Many of the highest offices went to eunuchs. A eunuch could not be an emperor, because he had no descendants to bequeath the crown to, so he was more trustworthy than somebody with children. Thus he found many opportunities for advancement, and the Byzantines, unlike other cultures, did not see castration as a disgrace. Noblemen might castrate their sons to give them more opportunities for good jobs, and at least one emperor, Romanus I, is known to have done that. Patriarchs and commanders of the army and navy were frequently eunuchs, like Narses. Doctors also found it to their advantage, for only eunuchs and female doctors could treat women. Overall, the presence of eunuchs in the imperial system may have brought stability, but as in ancient Rome and China, it eventually led to corruption.

The Visigoth Kingdom

The Visigoths did badly against both Clovis and Justinian because the kingdom was not held together very well; there were separate law codes for Visigoths and Romans, separate Christian sects for each group (the Visigoths were Arian and the Romans were Catholic), and struggles between the king and nobility weakened the state some more. This state of affairs began to turn around under King Leowgild (568-586), who pushed the Romans back to the coast (575) and conquered the kingdom of the Suevi (584), uniting most of the Iberian peninsula under his control.⁽¹⁶⁾ His successor Rekhared (586-601) became a Catholic in 589, ending the religious dispute they had with the Franks, Byzantines and their own subjects. In 631 they took the last Roman outposts, and two years later they established an elective monarchy. A later king, Rekiswinth, created a code of laws which applied to both Goths and Romans (the Lex Visigothorum, 654).

Though they defeated the Romans and eliminated the Vandals, Alans and Suevi, there was one group of people in the peninsula that the Visigoths could never conquer permanently--the Basques. The kings routinely sent expeditions into the Pyrenees, and the royal chronicles ended each king's list of accomplishments with the line et domuit Vascones (and subjugated the Basques), letting us know that none of them could hold the Basque country for long. In fact, the last Visigoth king, Roderick (see below), was trying yet another time to subjugate the Basques when word reached him that the Moslems were invading the realm from the south, forcing him to call off the Basque campaign.

As long as they were Arian, the Visigoths didn't care much about what their subjects believed (if they had they would have converted sooner), but after Rekhared switched, one's choice of religion became a serious matter. The Catholic Church was particularly concerned about a group that wouldn't convert to any form of Christianity--Spanish Jews. A series of church councils, held at Toledo with the king presiding, ordered a complete suppression of Judaism; any Jewish practice would be severely punished, and Jews were ordered to convert or get out of the country. The most drastic recommendation from the Church, put forth in 694, would have eliminated the Jews as a distinct people; it called for the enslaving of all adult Jews and the raising of their children as Christians. What saved the Jews at this point was that the decrees against them were not always enforced; some Visigoth kings didn't think anti-Semitism was cool.

By 708 the Islamic conquest of Morocco was complete, and the Visigoths committed a series of dumb acts that made sure their worst nightmares would come true. First, the Visigoth king, a religious moderate named Witiza, died in 710. His son Womba wasn't anti-Semitic enough to suit the Church, so it backed Roderick, the duke of Baetica, and Roderick took the throne instead. In response to this coup, Roderick's enemies and Womba's friends got together, and invited the Moslems to come to Spain; one of them, Count Julian of Ceuta, even provided ships for the crossing.

The invasion went better than expected, from the Moslem point of view; in 711 an Arab-Berber army crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, and in a single battle killed Roderick and destroyed the Visigoth Kingdom. The heirs of Witiza held out for a while at Narbonne (in Septimania), and some Gothic nobles set up a Christian kingdom (Asturias) just west of the still-independent Basques in 718, but the rest of the Iberian peninsula fell effortlessly under “Moorish” (Moslem) occupation by 713. In fact, it fell so quickly that the Arabs didn't have enough troops to pacify the whole territory. By now they had decided that they wouldn't let anybody else rule Spain, so they couldn't even trust the Visigoths on their side. Their solution was to give weapons to the Jews they had just liberated, and use them as a police force. In 720 Narbonne also fell to them, giving the Moslems a bridgehead across the Pyrenees.

The Merovingian Dynasty

This loyalty must have been strong, for the kingdom survived many attempts to divide it. Clovis and the kings who followed him regarded the kingdom as their own private estate; no matter how many sons there were, each had to inherit a share. But in those days life was “nasty, brutish and short,” meaning that because so many sons died without heirs, sooner or later the kingdom would come back together again. This sounds like luck, but if anyone had wanted to start a revolt, there were as many opportunities as there were princes. The Franks must have had a very strong sense of unity, which tied into their very strong sense of royal legitimacy. There were some horrid examples of treachery, murder and mutilation within the Merovingian family (a son of Clovis burned one of his rebellious offspring alive), but paradoxically, the long-haired person who sat on the throne was in less danger than the rest of the family; he was considered sacred, above any conflict that did not involve the whole state. The king was also backed by the Church; whether or not the clergy liked the throne's current occupant, they were committed by Church policy to support the rightful monarch of the Franks.⁽¹⁷⁾

Clovis had four sons: Theodoric I of Rheims, Chlodomar of Orléans, Childebert I of Paris, and Chlotar I of Soissons. Upon his death in 511 the kingdom was divided between them. They managed to get along without too much friction; in fact, the kingdom continued to expand vigorously. They conquered the Thuringians and Gascony in 531; in 532 they defeated the Burgundians at Autun and took over their country. When Justinian attacked the Ostrogoths the Franks seized Provence (537) and drove the Ostrogoths out of eastern Switzerland (536-539). Theudebert, the son of Theodoric I of Rheims, followed this up with an invasion of northwest Italy, where he destroyed Milan, defeated both the Ostrogoths and the army of Belisarius, and briefly occupied Genoa (539), but disease struck his troops and forced him to withdraw under a truce. In Constantinople, Justinian commemorated this lucky break by striking a medal that gave him a rather meaningless title, "Conqueror of the Franks." In 555 the Bavarians also acknowledged Frankish supremacy.

The temporary division of the Frankish kingdom lasted until 558, when Chlotar I, the youngest son, was the last one living; at that point the whole kingdom went to him by default. Like Clovis he had four sons (Charibert of Paris, Guntram of Orleans, Sigebert of Metz, and Chilperic I of Soissons), so a new division took place on his death three years later.

Because the Merovingian males were now dying (or getting killed off) faster than the characters in a modern soap opera, power went by default to two queens: Brunhilde and Fredegund. Brunhilde was originally a Visigoth princess from Spain, who had been given in marriage to Sigebert of Metz. Fredegund had a more common background; starting as a palace servant, she got the attention of Chilperic I of Soissons, became his mistress, then became his third wife, and finally became queen, after persuading Chilperic to put away his first wife and kill the second one.

Unfortunately, the second wife was Galeswintha, Brunhilde's sister, and her death caused a blood feud between Brunhilde and Fredegund which lasted for more than forty years. First they pulled their husbands into the quarrel, which wasn't difficult because an argument over how to divide the estate of Charibert of Paris, who had died childless in 567, had put Sigebert and Chilperic on bad terms with each other already. Sigebert banished Chiperic from the kingdom, raised an army, besieged Chilperic in the ancestral capital of Tournai, and was on the verge of becoming king of all the Franks when he was suddenly assassinated by agents of Fredegund (575). Brunhilde, humiliated and taken prisoner, barely managed to escape, and took charge of the east in the name of her son, Childebert II.

The Frankish kingdom was now split three ways, with Burgundy under Guntram of Orleans, Austrasia, meaning the "eastern land" under Childebert, and Neustria (most of modern France, called the "new land" because it had been conquered by Clovis) under Chilperic and Fredegund. Chilperic was in turn assassinated in 584, and Neustria passed to the son of Chilperic and Fredegund, Chlotar II (also spelled Lothar). When Guntram died in 592, his inheritance passed to Childebert, but Childebert died only three years later, so his estate was divided between two sons, Theudebert II and Theodoric II, with Brunhilde managing the government for both. Because Chlotar wasn't old enough to rule alone either, this meant that Fredegund was the real ruler of the west, while Brunhilde ruled the east and south.

Fredegund died of natural causes in 597, believe it or not, and Brunhilde now sought revenge on the surviving members of Fredegund's family. She got her sons to join forces against Chlotar II, reducing him to a petty king. Before they could finish the job, however, jealousy sprang up between the two brothers, and they waged war on each other instead, until Theudebert was killed in 612. A year later Theodoric died, too, and Brunhilde, now almost eighty years old, became regent of the whole kingdom, in the name of Sigebert II, her great-grandson and the son of Theodoric. This was too much for the Frankish nobility; even those who had served under Brunhilde didn't want a woman to have absolute power, so they went over to Chlotar. Before 613 was over, Chlotar captured Brunhilde and Sigebert on the battlefield, and executed them; for his aunt he devised a humiliating fate, first making the queen ride a camel past the jeering troops, then having her dragged to death behind a horse, thus finishing what his mother had started.

Because Chlotar was the last surviving great-grandson of Clovis, the kingdom was reunited under him. However, he was in no way an absolute monarch; he had to share power with Arnulf, the bishop of Metz, and Pepin the Elder (580?-639?, also called Pepin of Landen), an Austrasian noble. Ten years later Chlotar gave Austrasia to his son Dagobert, keeping Neustria and Burgundy for himself. By this time the Franks of the west and south were speaking the debased Latin of their ex-Roman subjects, which was now, through gradual changes in vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation, turning into French⁽¹⁸⁾ (Provençal in the case of Burgundy). Meanwhile, the eastern Franks stuck to the German language of their forefathers. When transportation and communications are poor, a difference in language can cause very powerful political strains. Consequently the division of the realm into French and German halves was more natural than the arbitrary partitions of the sixth century, and it became the usual pattern thereafter.

After Dagobert (629-639) none of the Merovingians had any real power. Indeed, most of them died before the age of twenty, so today's French call them Rois-fainéants, the "Do-Nothing Kings." Effective power fell into the hands of the Frankish equivalent of a prime minister, the majordomo, or “mayor of the palace.” It was Pepin of Herstal, the grandson of Pepin the Elder and mayor of the palace in Austrasia, who reunited the kingdom in 687. By doing that Pepin founded a new dynasty, so now we call him Pepin I, though he never sat on the throne.⁽¹⁹⁾ As for the real king, Pepin and his son Charles Martel (714-741) would bring him to the Field of March, the annual meeting between the king and the nobility, but kept him gently confined the rest of the time.

Martel means “the hammer,” and was a tribute to the military success Charles had, against a new enemy that could have killed them all. In the 720s, the Moslems of Spain began raiding the Frankish kingdom from their base in Septimania. The local duke, Odo of Aquitaine, defeated the first Moorish invasion, at Toulouse in 721. He was called "Odo the Great" because he had also fought Charles Martel previously, as the current champion of the kingdom's Neutrian faction, but by the end of the 720s the Moslem threat was too much for any duke to handle on his own. In 732 a combined army of Arabs and Berbers crossed the Pyrenees, destroyed Bordeaux, slaughtered the entire population of that town, defeated Odo in a battle at the Garonne River, and looted the rich monasteries of Aquitaine. The Frankish nobility now put aside their petty bickering, drawn together by their common fear of the “infidels.”

What Charles needed to stop this menace was a professional standing army, not a levy of peasants that could only be away from their farms between planting and harvest time. To get this army, Charles mobilized the realm ruthlessly, even confiscating Church lands to bribe or reward Frankish fighting men. In October 732, Charles and his host intercepted the Moslem invaders in central France, between the towns of Tours and Poitiers. For a week the two forces scouted one another, looking for an opening. When the battle did take place, the recently recruited knights didn't do very well; the Franks rode small ponies at this early date, did not have stirrups to keep them from falling out of the saddle every time something hit them, and were only poorly trained in the use of cavalry. By contrast, the Moslems were veterans with fine Arabian mounts. It was the Frankish infantry, massed together in a phalanx-style formation, that stood firm long enough for Charles to prevail; this victory made him both a Christian hero and the strongest man in the West.

The battle of Tours is called one of the turning points in history, and rightly so; had the Moslems succeeded in conquering France, there would probably be a Koran in every hotel room today! But in the hindsight of history, it appears that the battle has also been over-hyped. First of all, it did not have results in the short run; Charles had to defeat a second Moorish invasion, this time in the Rhone valley, in 739, and Moslem raiders continued to make trouble until the Franks conquered Septimania in 759. Secondly, it is possible that a Moslem defeat would have been the most likely outcome, regardless of the circumstances. With winter on the way, and his troops weighed down by loot, the best choice for the Moslem commander, Abdul Rahman al-Ghafiqi, would have been to withdraw to Spain and come back another year. France is not a desert but part of a forest-filled temperate zone, quite unsuitable for mounted archers used to the burning sands of Arabia and North Africa. More importantly, Abdul Rahman did not scout France adequately, thinking that only barbarian hordes existed north of the Pyrenees. Most important of all, the Moslems were fighting a whole nation, not just its rulers. The Byzantines, Persians and Visigoths were exhausted by long periods of war, and their kings were unpopular; by contrast, the people of France did not see themselves as oppressed.

Charles Martel was the man who made the Frankish kingdom work, but like his father he never felt it would be right to take the crown. By Frankish definition the king was a Merovingian, and no one could think of a way to legally separate that title from the royal family, so Charles continued to rule with a puppet king as his front man. Four years before Charles' death in 741, the Merovingian king died without leaving an heir, but even then Charles was so confident of his power--and so lacking in imagination--that instead of taking the throne for himself, he simply left it vacant.

England: The Heptarchy

We don’t know if the next king, Keredic, was related to his predecessors. In his reign the Anglo-Saxons lost their fear of the Britons and resumed their advance. The second time the West Saxons reached the Severn they won (the battle of Dyrham, 577). Keredic retreated into Wales; after this the British kingdom (or kingdoms, now disunity is taking its toll) was centered on the county of Gwynedd, in the northwest corner of Wales. His reign was followed by three unnamed “tyrants,” before Cadvan took over, shortly after the year 600.

At first Cadvan (Cadfan ap Iago) was only king of Gwynedd; he became the leader of all Britons by engaging Ethelfrith, the Angle king of Northumbria, in battle.⁽²⁰⁾ Ethelfrith got the better of the fighting, though; he won a victory at Chester which matched the Saxon triumph at Dyrham, thus conquering almost all of the north (616). As a result of these two battles the Britons of Wales were cut off from their kinsmen in the northwest (Strathclyde) and the southwest (Devon). This put an end to any hopes of a British comeback.

Cadvan married a Saxon noblewoman, and in 625 he was followed by Cadwallo, who died of old age in 633. Then came Cadwallader (Kydwaladr Vendigaid), whose reign was divided into two parts: 633-643 and 654-664. A decade after becoming king, Cadwallader came down with an unspecified illness; while was out of action, the Britons fought among themselves, crops were neglected, and plague and famine followed. For safety’s sake, Cadwallader went to the Continent, taking refuge with Alan II, king of Brittany and a member of King Arthur’s family. There he recovered, and eleven years later the kindly Alan persuaded him to return to Britain and resume his reign. After him his son Yvor and his nephew Yni jointly ruled over the remaining Britons in Wales. These were the last kings who styled themselves “kings of the Britons”; indeed the terms Britain and British disappeared and from now on the surviving Britons were known as Welsh (“barbaric foreigners”).⁽²¹⁾ Yvor and Yni were a persistent nuisance to the Saxons, and harassed them for many years, “. . . but little good did it do them!” It was in Britain, more than any other part of the Roman Empire, that the German invaders succeeded in imposing their laws, language and farming methods on the population; both Christianity and the use of Latin disappeared almost completely. That, and the atrocities committed in the wars, caused Britons to bitterly dismiss their new rulers as “a race hateful both to God and men.”

There were originally more than a dozen Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. One king was usually recognized as Bretwalda, meaning “Britain-ruler,” by the others, but the title only meant that he was recognized as the most powerful king on the island. It did not give him more power, nor was it hereditary. In the early seventh century the king of Northumbria was the usual Bretwalda; then in 679 Mercia got the title and put a lot more meaning into it. The Mercians annexed the small kingdoms on their borders--Magon (Hereford), Hwicce (Worcester), Middlesex, the kingdom of the Middle Angles and Lindsay (Lincoln). The number of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms was reduced to seven (Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Sussex, Wessex and Kent), giving rise to the term “Heptarchy” that is sometimes used for this period of English history. In the days of Offa, king of Mercia from 757 to 796, every ruler south of the Humber River had to get his approval for any important act.

The Anglo-Saxons often marked important boundaries with earth walls. King Offa built one which still stands today (Offa’s Dyke), all along the border between England and Wales. Whether he meant it or not, this marked the end of the Anglo-Saxon advance. Eighty percent of the inhabitants of Britain (about a million altogether) were now either English or living under English control.

Commerce in the Dark Ages

Two commodities were special enough to be imported from the Orient. One of these, silk, traversed the famous Silk Road from China through Central Asia and Persia, entering the Eastern Roman Empire at Antioch. Europeans knew nothing about how silk was made, so they paid a premium price for both raw silk and finished clothing. The other commodity, spices, started in India and usually went through the Persian Gulf, joining the Silk Road in Mesopotamia. Some spice-carrying ships also sailed up the Red Sea and unloaded in Egypt, linking with the Mediterranean network at Alexandria. The term “spice” as used here is misleading, for it not only refers to condiments like pepper, cloves and nutmeg, but also dyes, alum, perfumes, pigments, gums, and a variety of substances that were untested, but believed to be of medical value.

Because luxuries like silk and spices are the trade goods most often mentioned in the Middle Ages, one gets the impression that the Eastern Roman Empire failed to balance its trade, and that its reserves of gold were spent on things the people could do without. This is because contemporary sources are misleading; they mention interesting items like Baltic amber, Arabian pearls and Indian gems, while neglecting the more mundane goods of everyday trade. The size of the Empire's cities suggests that they did enough manufacturing to pay for the imported luxuries, and if the emperor forbade the export of bullion, it was not because of poverty but because of military weakness. He needed all available gold to subsidize friends and placate enemies abroad.

Whereas goods on the Asian trade routes had to be expensive, lightweight and nonperishable to be worth transporting, the Mediterranean trade network was a bulk transport system, that measured cargoes by the ton, rather than by the price. The principal commodities were grain (mostly wheat and barley), wine and oil, though timber and metals were nearly as important. Besides these, the typical merchant would deal in furs from northern Europe, and slaves from just about anywhere. Profit did not always drive this trade; the supply of wheat to Rome and Constantinople, for example, was a state service, and the wheat had to be delivered under any market conditions.

We can get a good idea of how the Roman economy worked by observing Egypt, the Empire's richest province. Egypt produced reliable surpluses of wheat and flax, it had a monopoly on papyrus, still the most popular writing material, and the Alexandria glassblowers were famous for their specialized work. Add the spice traffic and the result was a very large volume of exports. However, the government took much of the wheat, linen and papyrus without making any kind of payment, so the Egyptians didn’t prosper. In fact, they had to work hard to pay for the iron, timber, wine and oil that they imported.⁽²³⁾

The lack of cities in most of Europe was due to the predatory activity of the barbarians that had brought down the Western Roman Empire. Traffic in the western Mediterranean had all but come to a stop, thanks to the piracy of the Vandals. Rome's population declined when the Egyptian grain supply that fed her during the Pax Romana was shifted to Constantinople; those who remained had to rely on the smaller surpluses from Africa and Sicily. Nomad raids and the shrinking number of farmers forced the Romans to abandon much of their African farmland before the Vandals took it, and as the Vandals grew less belligerent they found themselves unable to bring it back under cultivation. Though the Eastern emperor Justinian conquered the Vandals, he too proved incapable of recovering the valuable hinterland.

Justinian's trade problem was that payment for the silk and spices went to his archenemy, the Persian Empire. To cut the Persian stranglehold on the east-west trade network, he encouraged merchants to go around Persia, instead of through it. An embassy was sent to the Turks in Central Asia to see if they would like to take part in a trade route that ran north of the Caspian, while interference in Arabian and Abyssinian affairs was supposed to make the Red Sea a safer place to sail than the Persian Gulf. Greeks had been sailing between India and Egypt since the second century B.C., and Arab ships now carried goods this way. Still, Egyptian merchants were more interested in the gold, ivory, and slaves of Black Africa, and the only spices they wanted were Arabian frankincense and myrrh. Both of Justinian's proposed trade routes were smart, but they failed because they were too far ahead of his time; he had no control over places as far away as Russia and Abyssinia. His biggest economic success was discovering the secret behind silk; silkworms were obtained by stealth and put to work around 550.⁽²⁴⁾

The emperors of the seventh and eighth centuries found their prospects depressing in the extreme. Many cities went up in smoke during the final war with Persia, and few were rebuilt. The Arabs did even more damage, raiding everywhere and taking away half the Empire’s land and people. Egypt’s grain started going to the Middle East instead of Constantinople, and following the loss of grain, the capital’s population fell so fast that for a while it looked like New Rome would go the way of Old Rome. Fortunately there were a few improvements, the main one being that Justinian's trade projects were now working. The arrival of a friendly tribe in south Russia, the Khazars, made it possible to set up the trade route around the Caspian. Trade with the Khazars brought some economic compensation for the loss of so much elsewhere; as Mediterranean commerce shrank, Black Sea traffic expanded. Even so, imperial resources were so depleted that it was an achievement just to survive. The loss of Egypt meant not only a shortage of food but also a shortage of gold; the iconoclastic movement may have been partly motivated by the state's need to tap the Church's supply of precious metal.

Trade in northwest Europe all but disappeared when the last Roman ship left the Atlantic (422). By then, the towns of France, Britain and Spain had been reduced to a few fortified outposts. The remaining commercial activity was picked up by a German tribe living on the shore of the North Sea, the Frisians. This grew to become a considerable traffic in wine, salt and oil by the eighth century. A few goods from Constantinople made it over the Alps to France; in return the West sent slaves, iron, and timber to the East. Still, it wasn't enough trade to justify building new roads, and many of the old roads fell into disuse because barbarians and bandits made traveling on them too risky. "It says much of the Middle Ages," as William Manchester put it, "that in the year 1500, after a thousand years of neglect, the roads built by the Romans were still the best in the continent."

This is as good a place as any to look at medieval textiles. There are four naturally occurring fibers which can be woven into cloth. Two have already been discussed, silk and flax. The use of wool was universal, but northwestern Europe always produced the best, so before 1000 it began to export woolen goods. Cotton growing was confined to the Middle East. Later it would be introduced to Spain and Italy by the Moslems, but it could not grow in the cold north and there was little demand for it there. Of the dyes available, most of those which came from plants (woad/indigo, saffron and madder) were common to all countries; the litmus lichen, though, grew only in the north. By far the best dyes were extracted from insects of the Coccidae family. The most famous of these today is cochineal, but this comes from the New World, and other species produced the carmine of Spain and the Middle East (especially Asia Minor and Transcaucasia) and the lac of India.⁽²⁴⁾

To vary the effects possible with dyes and to render them more brilliant and durable, mordants (usually alum) were used. Originally alum was obtained from the Sahara via Egypt and Morocco and from Asia Minor. Around 1300 the city-state of Genoa gained complete control of the market, obtaining their supply from rich mines in what was now western Turkey. Arab chemists learned how to make synthetic alum (from aluminum sulphate and wine), but this never replaced the real thing. When the Turks established the Ottoman Empire, Europe was only saved from an alum famine by the discovery of extensive deposits of alunite (a mineral very similar to and easily transformed into alum) in the part of Italy ruled by the pope. Papal alum factories started production in the mid-fifteenth century and the Papacy held a monopoly on alum for a long time thereafter.

The Church’s Role in the Recovery of The West

Fortunately for the West, the Church possessed remarkable powers of self-regeneration, and as the official clergy declined recovery came from a group that went to the opposite extreme: the ascetics. Ascetics turn up in all religious movements and, though more prominent in Oriental religions like Buddhism, they have always been present in Christianity. Emulation of lonely hermits like St. Anthony soon led to the hermit colony and when rules were established this became the monastery. By the end of the fourth century monasteries were commonplace in the Eastern Roman Empire; the West had fewer because it was hard for the poor western provinces to pay for the upkeep of the monks. Individual hermits were also more common in the east, the most famous of these being St. Simeon the Stylite (390-459), who practiced an extreme form of disciplined living by erecting a sixty-foot high pillar in Syria and living on top of it for the last 36 years of his life.

Western monasticism began its reform of the Church in the sixth century, when St. Benedict of Nursia founded a new Monastery at Monte Cassino, a lonely hilltop between Rome and Naples. At first he lived like the holy hermits of the East, staying in a cave overlooking a stream from a location so inaccessible that food had to be lowered to him on a rope by a friend who visited him every day. He attracted a lot of visitors during the three years he spent there, but eventually came to the conclusion that self-denial by itself is not the way to salvation. Afterwards, he preached strict rules to live by, but they were meant to help man get along better with his fellow man, not to mortify the flesh. For example, when one hermit tried to invent a new form of saintliness by chaining himself to a rock in a cave, Benedict sent him this message: “Break thy chain, for the true servant of God is chained not to rocks by iron, but to righteousness by Christ.”

From his own experience Benedict knew that only a few people are suited to live the disciplined life without direction, so he organized his monastery on a fully communal basis, and put down the rules for it in a remarkable book called A Little Rule for Beginners. The book outlined a complete social system that actually worked; the monks were required to balance their prayers with manual labor in farming or crafts, so that the monastery fed and maintained itself, rather than depending on contributions like the ones in the Eastern Roman Empire did. The monks elected their own governing abbot, who was answerable only to the pope, and to keep stability, each monk took an additional vow (besides the usual ones for poverty, celibacy and obedience) in which he promised to remain in the monastery until death, unless given special permission to leave. Monks were also forbidden to risk their health by fasting or doing anything else which did not benefit the entire community. The Benedictine Rule was a moderate and merciful alternative to what had been practiced before.

The Benedictine order was such a success that it quickly replaced all others in the West, including the zealous communities of Ireland. They became islands of stability in a troubled world, and attracted the commerce and scholarship of the day. The grain fields, vineyards, orchards, fish ponds, and workshops of the monasteries became the testing place for new techniques. The monastery also became a hospital for the sick, a school for those seeking an education, and a guesthouse for travelers. Thus despite their vows, the Benedictine monks grew rich and powerful precisely because the politics of the secular world didn't get in the way.⁽²⁶⁾

The first monk to become a pope was a Benedictine--Gregory I, also known as Gregory the Great (590-604). When Gregory was elected pope, he probably was not expected to be more than a shortlived caretaker; he was 49 years old, balding, frail, and suffering from a variety of ailments; he also continued to practice the humility of a monk, calling himself "servant of the servants of God." But he was also strong-willed, bold and energetic, and he had acquired much political experience. In his youth he was a prefect of Rome until the age of 33, when he suddenly gave up both his work and his fortune to join the priesthood. Gregory's talents were too valuable to be left unused in a cloister for long. He was pressed into service first as a deacon of Rome, then as papal envoy to Constantinople. After that mission he served as abbot of his monastery until a plague carried off Pope Pelagius II, and Gregory was elected despite his protests against serving in the world again.

By playing off the Lombards against the Eastern Roman Empire, Gregory succeeded in keeping both at a safe distance. He was also tireless in pursuing two goals: the conversion of non-Catholic barbarians (particularly the Visigoths and Lombards) and the placing of Western Europe's churches under direct Papal control. His success in all these endeavors insured that the Western Church would be a truly international one, making him the first of the medieval-era popes who ruled with the power of a king (in the absence of real kings), and whose activities allowed the growth of Papal power in the following centuries.

Gregory's greatest success was far away from Rome; he started the reconversion of pagan England. According to one story of questionable origin, he became interested in the Anglo-Saxons when he saw some blond-haired youths on sale in a slave market in Rome. Upon hearing that these attractive unfortunates were Angles, Gregory remarked, "Not Angles but Angels, had they but the Gospel." In 596 he dispatched a group of Benedictine monks led by Augustine, a member of Gregory's own St. Andrew's monastery. But in France the monks heard another tale about the people Gregory called "Angels"--that they drank human blood and liked the Christian variety best. This rumor sent Augustine hurrying back to Rome, where the pope hear