Jerusalem was Heraclius’s last moment of glory

The trip to Jerusalem was Heraclius’s last moment of glory. He fell ill soon afterward; and in the field in the 630s he was represented by other generals, who saw his most important frontiers collapse.

The future lay to the south. Muhammad died in 632, leaving behind a whirlwind prepared to move north, east, and west. The pummeling that Byzantine and Persian forces gave each other and the relative detachment of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt from Byzantine control gave the men of the desert their chance. Just as the northern barbarians had found their strength shadowing the empire they admired, so the Arabs of the desert marches had grown in strength and confidence and were prepared to seize an opportunity. If it was not divine providence that brought them to this moment, they seized it as though it were.

Defeated Theodore

In 634 the Arab armies invaded Syria and defeated Theodore, the emperor’s brother, in a string of battles. Heraclius raised a large army that attacked the Arabs near the Yarmuk River, a tributary of the Jordan, in the fall of 636. After a successful beginning, the larger Byzantine army was defeated and put to flight. Roman Syria was easily taken at that point. The Arabs capitalized on Persia’s disarray by quickly taking the whole of the frontier lands (including Mesopotamia and Armenia) and then Egypt not long afterward. Alexandria fell in 640 after a siege that lasted more than a year. At that time, Muhammad had been dead less than a decade.

What was left for ancient empire? The Balkans, the suburbs of Constantinople, most of Asia Minor, and the African outpost around Carthage that Justinian had seized at such cost. Italy remained, with as much cost as benefit, but the African base would support Constantinople for the sixty years remaining before the Arabs seized it at the turn of the eighth century. (Sicily remained Byzantine much longer: without it, the whole of Byzantine pretension might have fallen.) By the end of the seventh century, the economics of empire had caught up with Constantinople and the city population collapsed.

Heraclius died on February 11, 641, his empire fully and finally in tatters. His two sons failed to establish themselves, and it was his grandson Constans II who became emperor later that year at age eleven, at the onset of what would be a long and pointless reign. Irony alone would accompany him as he visited Rome in 663, the first emperor seen there in two centuries. He was assassinated in his bath in 668, and his successors forgot the west.

Eventually Slavic

The first monks and in many ways the real monks were eastern, whether they spoke Greek, Syriac, Coptic, or, eventually, Slavic. That eastern monasticism is what we find east of the Adriatic to this day, most notably in the ancient communities of Mount Athos in Greece, a whole landscape of celibate communities. Western monasticism was different.

Desert before

Westerners heard about the monastic founders of the desert before they met any of them or their followers. Here and there imitation broke out, but it was not until long after our period that there were any appreciable numbers of western monks. “Desert” in the west didn’t mean a barren landscape so much as it meant a remote wasteland, and the earliest houses were forest hermitages and huts, well away from towns and cities. The most austere landscapes of the eastern monastic desert were often (as in Egypt and around Jerusalem) only a few miles from bright lights and big cities. In the west, monks were more likely to be in genuinely remote locations.

Until the turn of the fifth century, there were few communities, and there was not much excitement outside their walls. Augustine called the household he led at Hippo a monastery, and his sister led a house of religious women there, though they didn’t always get along well. The reputation of the eastern desert came west, inspiring deeds and words. The former soldier Martin drew a small community around him in the last years of the fourth century near Tours in central Gaul. When he was gone, Sulpicius Severus, a writer who had never met him, told his story of piety and power in a book that made him out as a western rival and worthy competitor of the legends of the east. If you think, Sulpicius’s argument ran, that there are holy men in the east, well, we have our own, and here are astonishing stories to prove it. Those stories never really found a readership or a reputation until more than a century later, when the Frankish kings began to present Martin, for their own political reasons, as a locally grown saint and sage.

A COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

Some men survived in ravaged Italy and even came to prosper again. Three of the senate’s dignitaries from the days of Theoderic lived past their ninetieth birthday and remained atop the greased pole of public life—or rather, leaped from one greased pole to another, deftly and just in time. Least known to us of the three is Cethegus, sole consul of the year 504, master of the offices not long after, and patrician from 512 until his death almost half a century later in 558.

Ennodius praised him in writing as a younger contemporary in his little work on the best way to educate young gentlemen; and Cassiodorus addressed a puzzling document to him consisting partly of family boasting, partly of social climbing, and partly of a biographical index of a few famous contemporaries. Cethegus persisted and persisted in Italy, holding out until 547 or so, after the fall of Rome to Totila in 546. He was by now caput senatus (“head of the senate” by dignity and seniority). He fled Rome before it fell because he was suspected of pro-Gothic sympathies, as many of the veterans of Theoderic’s time would be suspected. When he came to Constantinople, he was regularly seen around and with Pope Vigilius, supporting doctrinal rapprochement and a more vigorous prosecution of the war at home. He seems to have stayed in Constantinople until the last dog had been hung back in Italy and the war finally ended, but we glimpse him one last time at home, now in Sicily, receiving a letter from Pope Pelagius I in about 558.

Liberius, the patrician who had been praetorian prefect in Italy before Theoderic, then served him and his successors in that role in Gaul for a quarter century, appeared in Italy in 535; there, Theodahad put him in a delegation sent to Constantinople to make peace. The sources we have credit him as the one voice who spoke up in Constantinople to report the murder of Amalasuntha, the deed that more than any other gave a pretext for Justinian’s invasion. Liberius was unable, as a result, to return to any Italy not ruled from Constantinople, and so stayed on in the east, where his long experience won him appointment at an advanced age (he must have been well over seventy by then) as Augustal prefect in Alexandria, effectively Justinian’s representative to and governor over Egyptian society.

Sent from Constantinople

In Egypt, Liberius was the grand avenging inquisitor, sent from Constantinople to bring a restive province to civil and ecclesiastical heel. He did as well as could be expected—which is to say, he left no lasting result. Justinian soon turned on him and sent out a replacement without bothering to recall Liberius. Remarkably, Liberius prevailed in an unfair fight, sending his would-be supplanter home in disgrace. Officially recalled shortly thereafter, Liberius still succeeded in defending himself before a court of inquiry on his return to Constantinople in the early 540s. There we must imagine him as part of the circle of western adventurers that also included Cassiodorus and Cethegus, eyes wide open for the main chance.

Even then, his career was not over. When Justinian prepared to send his nephew Germanus west to complete the war in Italy, Liberius was variously the stand-in and deputy as preparations dragged on, eventually going on in command ahead of Germanus, who then died before he could undertake the campaign. Justinian is said to have had second thoughts about the elderly general, but too late to stop his last success. He arrived at Syracuse to find the city under siege by Totila’s forces. Undismayed, he forced his way through the barbarian lines, sailed into the harbor, and got his entire force into the city customized tours balkan.

Armenian named Artabanes

While this was going on, Liberius’s appointed successor, an erratic Armenian named Artabanes, was trying to catch up with him to relieve him of command. But Artabanes encountered a terrific storm off the coast of Calabria and wound up, temporarily, on Malta. Liberius, meanwhile, was in the beleaguered Syracuse. Procopius reports that he found himself unable to carry out successful military actions while constricted by Totila’s siege forces, and that this military impotence made his troops an unwelcome burden on the limited supplies of the besieged city; so he once more embarked his troops and slipped out of Syracuse for a better encampment at Palermo—all this, while Totila was plundering Sicily at will.

Artabanes finally caught up with Liberius in Palermo in 551 and relieved him of command. One story has Liberius going on a last mission to command Justinian’s forces in Spain, but we find his tombstone in northern Italy, near Rimini, with a fine inscription in eight elegiac couplets, suggesting either that he retired to Italy directly from Sicily or that he made his way back into Italy after the “Pragmatic Sanction” to live in the shadow of the new regime from Constantinople. He was about ninety when he died. There is a hint that a descendant was still wealthy and well connected as late as the 590s.

At the sack of Constantinople in 1453

Other dates offer themselves: we have already seen Gibbon’s choice, at the sack of Constantinople in 1453, but that was the whimper, not the bang. The balance of power in medieval Asia Minor had tilted strongly toward the Turks 200 years earlier, when the other Roman empire and its allies and friends, the crusaders, overthrew the Christian empire of Constantinople. Constantine’s fundamental idea, that he could maintain hegemony over the Balkans, Asia Minor, and the eastern lands beyond from a perch in the Bosporus and the Golden Horn, is exactly the idea that Mehmed the Conqueror accepted when he put Constantinople out of its misery and made it his capital. Dismantling the dilapidated city’s pathetic rump of an empire in 1453 secured Turkish domination more by securing continuity than by changing anything fundamental. (Some western powers even welcomed the new partner.) Mehmed saw himself as the successor to the Roman emperor, and thus in an important way Constantine’s fundamental vision was sustained intact not merely till 1453, but till 1924—the last gasp of the Ottoman empire and its suppression in favor of a more modest and modern republic of Turkey.

If we ask what became of the Roman-hearted (who had power that’s now departed), looking for a single date at which a switch was thrown and an empire ceased to exist never makes real sense. Instead, we’ll first have to reframe the question as one that can be answered, and answered on a human scale. Human beings live in a moving window of time that remembers a generation or two of the past reasonably well and that imagines a future best measured in decades, not centuries or millennia. The century or so from 476 to 604 CE reflects human plans and wishes with their successes and failures, showing how rulers who could not understand their world as existing on a continuum much older than themselves squandered countless opportunities stoletov bulgaria tours.

WHEN DID IT HAPPEN?

I will identify the dates of events using the western convention BCE and CE, corresponding to BC and AD. No one alive in the time of this story used that dating system regularly, and only a few were aware of it, but many would have understood it if you had described it to them. To the best of our knowledge, the scheme was devised in the 520s by Dionysius Exiguus (“Denis the Short” or perhaps merely “Denis the Humble”), who calculated that Jesus had been incarnated at the Annunciation—the moment when Mary met the angel and became pregnant, which he dated to March 25 in the year 754 of the city of Rome: that is, 1 CE or AD 1. (The first Christmas, by that reckoning, fell on December 25 of the year 1.)

Fortunately for us, Dionysius had the year wrong. Jesus was born no later than 4 BCE and perhaps as early as 8 BCE. If Dionysius had been correct, then the second millennium would have arrived between 1992 and 1996 and a generation of computer programmers would have had even less time than they did to forestall the confusion of Y2K. We hear of Dionysius’s work first in his own time in another writer’s treatise on the mechanism for fixing the date of Easter, and at least one seventh-century chronicler reckoned dates that way, but it was not until the eighth century that the Anglo-Saxon historian Bede employed it consistently and found a relatively wide readership. The scholar Alcuin took the idea to the continent, where it caught on and flourished under the influence of Charlemagne.

In the sixth century, in other words, there was no sixth century. People were generally aware of how long it had been since Christ was born (in the late fourth century some surmised that the 365th year after the crucifixion would see the second coming of Jesus), but public documents and official records, even church documents, used more ancient ways of counting. The commonest and most venerable were still consular years, and until 541 CE one or two consuls were appointed in each year and the year bore their names—“in the consulship of X and Y”—and the roster of names going back to 509 BCE was a source of pride for the families who found ancestors on it. When consuls were no longer named, counting and naming years from the beginning of the current emperor’s reign was more common.