The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (12 page)

Narses was no soldier. Most of his life had been spent in the Palace, where he had risen to be commander of the imperial bodyguard, but this was more a domestic appointment than a military one. Justinian had, however, sent him to Italy in 538, ostensibly in command of a body of troops to swell the Byzantine army during the Goths’ siege of Rome but in fact to keep an eye on Belisarius, whose youth, brilliance and unconcealed ambition were already making the Emperor uneasy. There Narses had shown himself to be a superb organiser, strong-willed and determined; thirteen years later he had lost none of his energy or his decisiveness. He also knew his Emperor better than any man alive, and easily persuaded him to make available a far greater army than he had intended for Germanus: at least 35,000 men, most of them barbarians but also including a number of Persians captured during the recent war with Chosroes.

Not until the early summer of 552 did Narses begin his march into Italy. Still lacking the ships to transport his army, he was obliged to take the land route, advancing round the head of the Adriatic to Ravenna, where he provided what was left of the local troops with their long overdue arrears of pay. He then headed south across the Apennines and down the Via Flaminia towards Rome, Totila marching northward up the same road to block his path. They met near the little village of Taginae, for what was to prove the decisive encounter of the entire war. The Gothic army was progressively outflanked and out-fought and finally, as the sun was sinking, took flight. Totila himself, mortally wounded, fled with the rest but died a few hours later.

For the Goths all hope was now lost, but they did not surrender. Unanimously they acclaimed Teia, one of the bravest of Totila’s generals, as his successor and continued the struggle. Narses meanwhile pursued his journey south, city after city opening its gates to the conquerors. Rome itself fell after a brief siege–changing hands for the fifth time since the beginning of Justinian’s reign–but still the old eunuch marched on. Totila, he had learned, had deposited vast reserves of treasure and bullion at Cumae on the Bay of Naples; Narses was determined to lay his hands on it before it was spirited away. Teia was equally determined to stop him, and at the end of October, in the Sarno valley just a mile or two from the already long-forgotten Pompeii, the two armies met for the last time. Teia was felled by a well-aimed javelin, but even after his head had been impaled on a lance and raised aloft for all to see, there was to be no retreat: his men battled on until the evening of the following day. By the terms of the subsequent treaty, the Goths undertook to leave Italy and to engage in no further warfare against the Empire. Justinian’s grandest ambition was realised at last.

History offers few examples of a campaign as swift and decisive as that of Narses being successfully concluded by a general in his mid-seventies–nor, surely, any more persuasive argument in favour of castration. Almost unbelievably, however, just as the ancient Armenian was marching his men into Italy in the spring of 552, another, smaller Byzantine expeditionary force had landed in Spain under the command of a general older still. His name was Liberius, and he is recorded as having been Praetorian Prefect of Italy sixty years before, in the days of Theodoric. At the time of which we are speaking, therefore, he cannot possibly have been less than eighty-five.

By now Spain was firmly in the hands of the Visigoths, who had first arrived there–in the wake of several other barbarian tribes–in 416, and who in 418 had made a pact with Rome by the terms of which they agreed to recognise the sovereignty of the Empire. The position was thus very much the same as it had been in Italy under Theodoric, with a Roman landowning aristocracy living comfortably on its estates, perfectly satisfied with the status quo and doubtless grateful that the immense distance separating them from Constantinople reduced imperial interference to the point of imperceptibility. For them and their Visigothic masters, the first warning of the approaching storm came with Belisarius’s recovery of North Africa from the Vandals in 533, and his eviction of a Visigothic garrison from the port of Septem (now Ceuta) the following year. An attempt by the Visigothic king Theodis to seize it back in 547 ended in disaster; his protests that the Romans had cheated by attacking on a Sunday while he was in church did not alter the fact that his army had been annihilated, and he himself met his death shortly afterwards at the hands of an assassin.

Then, in 551, Theodis’s second successor, King Agila, found himself faced with a rebellion led by his own kinsman, Athenagild, who appealed to the Emperor for help. Here was precisely the opportunity Justinian had been waiting for. He ordered that a small force–perhaps a thousand or two at the most–should be detached from Narses’s army and sent under Liberius to Spain. It met with little resistance: the Visigothic army was split down the middle. Before long Liberius effectively controlled the whole area south of a line drawn from Valencia to Cadiz, including Cordoba. In 555 Agila was murdered by his own troops and Athenagild assumed the throne without opposition.

Had the new king agreed to rule as an imperial vassal, all would have been well; such, however, had never been his intention, and he made it clear to Liberius that he expected him and his army to withdraw as soon as they conveniently could. The old man–who was clearly every bit as good a diplomat as he was a general–agreed in principle, but gradually persuaded Athenagild to negotiate; finally the two reached an understanding whereby the Empire kept much of the territory it had conquered. But there were nowhere near enough soldiers available for adequate garrisoning, and the lines of communication were dangerously long: Justinian was soon forced to acknowledge that a good 80 percent of the Iberian peninsula lay beyond his control. On the other hand he retained the Balearic Islands–which, together with Corsica and Sardinia (reconquered respectively by Belisarius and Narses) gave him a firm base in the western Mediterranean–and he could boast that his empire now once again extended from the Black Sea to the Atlantic Ocean.

So, technically, it did; but the Visigoths continued to flourish. Ruling now from Toledo, Athenagild and his successors in a series of highly successful campaigns managed to extend their authority over more and more of the country, until finally in the early seventh century the last imperial enclave, centred on Cartagena, was liquidated. By the end of that same century the two separate communities, Roman and Gothic, that had characterised Spain for the past three hundred years had similarly ceased to exist. In the year 700 it was thus a relatively united Gothic people that inhabited the Iberian peninsula, but only a single decade of the new century was to pass before that people was called upon to face a new and terrible enemy.

Justinian is believed to have been the last Byzantine Emperor to have spoken Latin more easily than he did Greek–though he was fluent in both. Two centuries after Constantine the Great had transplanted his empire into the Greek world, the hellenisation of the Empire was almost complete. From its foundation by Augustus it had always embraced both the Latin and the Greek civilisations, and with the passage of time these had continued to diverge, developing in their own very different ways. The Greeks, for example, having been spared the worst of the barbarian invasions, had rapidly outclassed the Latins in learning as well as in general sophistication, and felt themselves to be immeasurably superior. Their passion for disputation, however, kept the Eastern Church in almost continual ferment and led to the development of several serious heresies; and succeeding Patriarchs, if they recognised the supremacy of the Pope at all, did so with increasing reluctance. Excepting only the Papacy, the Byzantine Empire was almost certainly the most religiously orientated state in the history of Christendom. Already in the fourth century St Gregory of Nyssa had written:

If you ask a man for change, he will give you a piece of philosophy concerning the Begotten and the Unbegotten; if you enquire the price of a loaf, he replies: ‘The Father is greater and the Son inferior’; or if you ask whether the bath is ready, the answer you receive is that the Son was made out of nothing.

In later centuries this tendency showed no sign of diminishing; indeed, it is arguable that without it the Byzantines would never have developed the most deeply spiritual art that the Mediterranean world has ever known. Their artists were instructed to depict the Spirit of God: a tall order perhaps, but one which, in their icons, mosaics and frescos, they fulfilled again and again.

The Mediterranean world as it existed under Justinian was very different from the one known to the Emperors of the first and second centuries; Constantine the Great and the barbarian invasions had seen to that. However much the Byzantines might protest to the contrary, their Roman Empire had little in common with that of Augustus and his successors. From Rome itself power and authority had long since departed; and Constantinople, by virtue of its geographical position alone, could never dominate the western Mediterranean as Rome had done. No longer were the Middle Sea and the lands surrounding it subject to a single power; no longer could it be described as a Roman lake, still less–even after Justinian’s reconquest of Italy–as
mare nostrum
. Even such tenuous claims in that direction as could be made in the sixth century were, all too soon, to be dramatically revised.

CHAPTER V

Islam

Until the second quarter of the seventh century, the land of Arabia was terra incognita to the Christian world. Remote and inhospitable, productive of nothing to tempt the sophisticated merchants of the west, it had made no contribution to civilisation and seemed unlikely ever to do so. Its people, insofar as anyone knew anything about them, were presumed to be little better than savages, periodically slaughtering each other in violent outbreaks of tribal warfare, falling mercilessly upon any traveller foolhardy enough to venture among them, making not the slightest attempt towards unity or even stable government. Apart from a few scattered Jewish colonies around the coast and in Medina, and a small Christian community in the Yemen, the overwhelming majority practised a sort of primitive polytheism which, in the city of Mecca–their commercial centre–appeared to be somehow focused on the huge black stone, the Kaaba, that stood in their principal temple. Where the outside world was concerned they showed no interest, made no impact and certainly posed no threat.

Then, in the twinkling of an eye, all was changed. In September 622 the Prophet Mohammed had taken flight with a few followers from the hostile city of Mecca to friendly Medina, thus marking the starting point for the whole Muslim era; just five years afterwards, in 633, showing a discipline and singleness of purpose of which they had previously given no sign and which therefore took their victims totally by surprise, his followers suddenly burst out of Arabia. A year later, an Arab army had crossed the desert and defeated the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius on the banks of the Yarmuk river; after three years they had taken Damascus; after five, Jerusalem; after eight, they controlled all Syria, Palestine and Egypt. Within twenty years, the whole Persian Empire as far as the Oxus had fallen to the Arab sword; within thirty, Afghanistan and most of the Punjab. Then, after a brief interval for consolidation, the conquerors turned their attention to the west. The Byzantine Empire having proved too tough a nut to crack–they had made no headway at all in Asia Minor–they took the longer but easier route along the southern shore of the Mediterranean. The conquest of Egypt took just two years, from 639 to 641, after which the pace slowed, owing partly to the fact that the post-conquest Egyptian administration presented so many problems; without the help and experience of the natives–the Copts and the Jews, the Samaritans and the Greeks–the still unsophisticated Arabs would have been quite unable to impose their authority.

Thus it was not before the end of the century that they reached the Atlantic, and not until 711 that they were ready to cross the Straits of Gibraltar into Spain. But by 732, still less than a century after their eruption from their desert homeland, they had made their way over the Pyrenees and, according to tradition, pressed on to Tours–where, only 150 miles from Paris, they were checked at last by the Frankish king Charles Martel in an engagement which inspired Gibbon to one of his most celebrated flights of fancy:

A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the Rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or the Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pupils might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the Revelation of Mahomet.

Modern historians are quick to point out that the battle of Tours is scarcely mentioned by contemporary or near-contemporary Arab historians, and then only as a comparatively insignificant episode. The evidence of these writers strongly suggests that the Arabs encountered by Charles Martel were simply a raiding party that had ventured perhaps hundreds of miles in advance of the main army, and that the so-called battle was in fact little more than a protracted skirmish. In any case, a glance at the map will show that the real Muslim threat to Europe would come from the east, a far shorter and easier route for an army that had already mopped up the Levant. It was not to Charles and his Franks, but to the stalwart defenders of Constantinople under Constantine IV in 674–78 and Leo III in 717–18, that we owe the preservation of both Eastern and Western Christendom.

History provides, nevertheless, few parallels for so dramatic a saga of conquest, or for the establishment, in the space of less than a hundred years, of an empire stretching from the Himalayas to the Pyrenees. For this phenomenon the usual explanation is that the Arabs were carried forward on a great surge of religious enthusiasm; and so in a way they were. It is worth remembering, however, that this enthusiasm was almost untouched by missionary zeal. The Muslim leaders never saw themselves as having been divinely appointed to conquer the world in the name of Islam. The Koran permitted warfare in self-defence but did not sanctify it for its own sake; moreover, it stated clearly that where Jews and Christians were concerned there should be no coercion in matters of faith. They too were monotheists–‘peoples of the Book’–who had received perfectly valid revelations of their own.

What the new religion provided was above all a sense of brotherhood and unity. In the past the various Arab tribes had been constantly at war with one another; now, all fellow-servants of Allah, they were as one. This in turn imbued them with almost limitless self-confidence. They were utterly convinced that their God was with them; even if it were His will that they should fall in battle, they would receive their immediate reward in paradise–and a most agreeably sensual paradise at that, whose promised delights were, it must be admitted, a good deal more alluring than those of its Christian counterpart. In this world, on the other hand, they were only too willing to adopt a disciplined austerity that they had never known before, together with an unquestioning obedience whose outward manifestations were abstinence from wine and strong drink, periodic fasting and the five-times-daily ritual of prayer.

The founder of their religion was himself never to lead them on campaign. Born of humble origins some time around 570, orphaned in early childhood and finally married to a rich widow considerably older than himself, Mohammed was that rare combination of a visionary mystic and an astute, far-sighted statesman. In the former capacity he preached, first, the singleness of God and second, the importance to mankind of total submission (
islam
) to His will. This was not a particularly original creed–both Jews and Christians, inside Arabia as well as out, had maintained it for centuries–but it seemed so to most of those who now heard it for the first time; it was Mohammed’s skill to present it in a new, homespun form, clothed in proverbs, fragments of desert lore and passages of almost musical eloquence, all of which were combined in the posthumous collection of his revelations which we know as the Koran. He was clever, too, in the way in which–though he almost certainly considered himself a reformer rather than a revolutionary–he managed to identify his own name and person with the doctrine he preached: not by ascribing any divinity to himself, as Jesus Christ had done, but by putting himself forward as the last and greatest of the prophets, among whom all his predecessors–including Jesus–were subsumed.

To be a prophet, however, was not to be a theologian; and perhaps the most striking difference between Mohammed and the Christians whose lands his followers were so soon to overrun was his indifference to theological speculation. It was, he maintained, useless to argue over abstruse dogmas (as the Greeks loved to do), the more so since their truth or falsehood could never be proved. Islam, as E. M. Forster put it, ‘threw them all down as unnecessary lumber that do but distract the true believer from his God’. Far more important was the way one lived in society, upholding justice and compassion for one’s fellow men and maintaining a fair and reasonable distribution of wealth. Spiritual fervour he possessed in abundance, but he was never a fanatic; like Jesus, he had come not to destroy but to fulfil. He perfectly understood the people among whom he lived, and was always careful not to push them further than they would willingly go. He knew, for example, that they would never abandon polygamy; he therefore accepted it, and indeed himself took several more wives after the death of his first. Slavery was another integral part of Arabian life; this too he tolerated. He was even prepared to come to terms with the old animist religion; as early as 624 he decreed that the faithful should turn towards the Kaaba in Mecca when praying, rather than towards Jerusalem as he had previously enjoined. He never ceased to stress, on the other hand, one entirely new and distinctly unpalatable aspect of his creed–the inevitability of divine judgement after death; often, it seemed, he described the torments of hell even more vividly than the joys of paradise. This fear of retribution may well have proved useful when he came to weld his followers into a political state.

Mohammed died of a fever in Mecca–to which he had triumphantly returned–on 8 June 632. The leadership, both religious and political, of his people passed to his oldest friend and most trusted lieutenant, Abu-Bakr, who assumed the title of Caliph–literally, representative–of the Prophet. In the year following, the Muslim armies marched. But Abu-Bakr was already growing old; he in turn died in 634–according to tradition during the month of August, on the very day of the capture of Damascus–and it was under the second Caliph, Omar, that the initial series of historic victories was won. In one respect in particular, luck was on the side of the Arabs; the indigenous Christian peoples of Egypt and North Africa, Syria and Palestine felt no real loyalty towards the Emperor in Constantinople, who represented an alien Graeco-Roman culture and whose lack of sympathy for their several heresies had periodically led to active persecution. To many of them the Muslim tide, composed as it was of Semites like themselves, professing a rigid monotheism not unlike their own and promising toleration for every variety of Christian belief, must have seemed infinitely preferable to the regime it had swept away.

Before the Muslim conquest, North Africa had formed part of the Byzantine Empire and was protected by the Byzantine navy. To the Arabs it was consequently enemy territory, which they were determined to appropriate. Egypt offered little resistance. The Arab leader Amr ibn al-As
⁴⁷
had only 4,000 men when he invaded the country in the early spring of 640; two and a half years later, the great city of Alexandria–the most venerable in the entire Mediterranean, founded by Alexander of Macedon and for some six centuries the seat of one of the four patriarchates of Eastern Christendom–was voluntarily surrendered by the Empire. It was never to recover its former glory.
⁴⁸
Returning southward from the delta, Amr then founded the garrison city of al-Fustat, the germ of modern Cairo. His other achievement was to clear the canal that ran eastward from the Nile to the former Byzantine port of Klysma, about a mile from the modern Suez, opening the way to the passage of vessels laden with grain from the Nile valley to the Red Sea and Arabia.

During their first advance the Muslims had no fleet–few of them, indeed, had ever seen the sea–but it soon became clear that if they were to maintain their impetus they would have to master the arts of seamanship and navigation. Just as the Romans had whenever possible used Greeks to man their vessels, so the Arabs found experienced shipbuilders and seamen in the Christians of Egypt and Syria; with their help they were gradually able to construct dockyards, and so to build up a formidable fleet both of war galleys and of merchantmen until they were able to challenge the naval supremacy of Byzantium itself. By 655 they had launched raids on Cyprus, Crete, Rhodes and Sicily; after the Muslim annihilation of the main Byzantine fleet, commanded by the Emperor Constans II in person, off the coast of Lycia in that same year, it must have seemed uncertain whether the balance of naval power in the Mediterranean would ever be the same again. Fortunately the Byzantines had already developed their most effective secret weapon, ‘Greek fire’, shot in great tongues of flame from their ships’ prows. It was thanks to this alone that the Empire was able to maintain some degree of control.

There was another reason too for the slowness of the Arab advance after the conquest of Egypt. As anyone who has driven the 600-odd miles between Benghazi and Tripoli knows all too well, the desert terrain is featureless and the road apparently interminable; it certainly offered no chance of booty or plunder to make it remotely attractive to the Arab army. The area was also a hotbed of hostile tribes. Sooner or later the task of pacification and conquest would clearly have to be undertaken, but political crises in Medina delayed the fateful decision; and the foundation of the Umayyad Empire,
⁴⁹
with the consequent removal of the seat of government to Damascus in 661, caused still further delays. Not until 667 did the great march begin, and three years later its leader, Okba ibn Nafi, established the great fortress of Kairouan in what is now Tunisia. Further west, however, he encountered heavy resistance from both the Byzantines and the Christian Berber tribesmen; only in 692, after another army of 40,000 had been despatched by Caliph Abdul-Malik, could progress be resumed. In 693 Carthage fell, despite a Berber uprising led by a mysterious queen-priestess named al-Kahina–a figure straight out of Rider Haggard–and an amphibious assault by a Byzantine army. Both were eventually beaten back, though al-Kahina continued to fight a guerrilla war until 701. The Arabs did not make Carthage their capital; its harbour was too vulnerable to attack from the sea. Instead they built a great fortress at Tunis, connecting an inland lake to the coast. Here was a formidable new springboard from which to harass Sardinia, Sicily, Cyprus and the Balearic Islands. Raids on all these–often ending in temporary occupation–continued until around 750, when Byzantine resistance suddenly grew stronger and when, as we shall shortly see, the Muslim world found that it had other things to think about.