In the sixth century, imperial armies were still large, the infantry tactics and
military units of Rome’s heyday were still in use, and they functioned on
the strength of an urban economy whose structure was older still (see below,
pp. 99–100). Expeditionary forces reconquered the coastline of north Africa
and southern Spain and took back Sicily and Italy; their spoils bolstered
Justinian’s (527–65) triumphalist claim to have restored the Roman empire
to former worldwide glories (see below, pp. 201–3, 207, 208–10). Yet these
were protestations in the face of uncertainties arising from plague, natural
disasters, incursions of armed outsiders and internal religious dissent.
Characteristics of Byzantium following the seventh-century ‘transformation
of a culture’19 can already be discerned in the era of Justinian – notably
the fusion of faith and imperium; penny-pinching and a cast of defensiveness
behind imperial bluster; and the assumption that a correct approach
to the divine held the key to earthly imperial as well as spiritual salvation.
The uncertainties of the sixth century made divine sense, if one accepted
the numerous predictions of the end of the world then in circulation.20
While individual responses ranged from the traditional to the Christian,
involving amulets, relics and incantations,21 church-going congregations
and monasteries looked to the scriptures, priest-directed worship and holy
men. In enumerating the fortified towns and refuges furnished by Justinian
for rural populations in the Balkans, Procopius acknowledged the
inevitability of barbarian incursions: yet he also stressed that the emperor
was manifestly doing everything within his powers to protect, offering his
subjects both a literal and spiritual safe haven (see below, p. 111).22 Thus the
imperial order joined forces with faith and public acts of worship to offer
a modicum of security: it is likely that by the later sixth century, images
of the Mother of God and of the saints were being venerated with mounting
intensity and orchestration.23 The emperor also offered underpinnings
for social peace and order in the form of clear, accessible codification and
distillation of Roman law (see below, pp. 107–9).
A peculiar blend of military triumphalism, strenuous intercession for
divine support and careful husbanding of assets helped the Byzantines
survive as a collective the drastic turn of events in the seventh century
and beyond. The medieval empire’s components were scattered and disparate,
from the basileus in his God-protected City down to the inhabitants
of fortified towns and self-sufficient, semi-pastoral hill-country kingroups
in Anatolia or the Balkans. Their material circumstances and degrees
of security varied considerably. But a substantial proportion even of the
country-dwellers were within reach of refuges of some kind, and also of
churches. Since the blend began to be brewed in Justinian’s era – when
elaborate earthly measures of protection for the civilian population were
instituted, first put constantly to the test and found only partly wanting –
so do our opening chapters. They also take full account of the empire’s
eastern neighbours and rivals, current and to come. Persia’s rulers, the
Sasanians, made much of their victories over the Romans, defining their
own power in terms of these. Yet their institutional base may not have been
quite as firm as this implies, while substantial minority groups within their
realm worshipped the Christian God (see below, pp. 144, 153–5). The coexistence
and cultural interaction of these two great powers prefigures that
of Byzantium and the Abbasid caliphate, whose court in Baghdad drew on
Persian customs, political thought and high culture.24 The Arabs in the age
of the Prophet Muhammad lacked the Persians’ sophistication, yet their
capacity for literacy, diplomacy and organised warfare was more advanced
than hostile Romans, or their own later writers, allowed. To that extent
their adroitness in exploiting the aftermath of ‘the last great war of antiquity’
between Byzantium and Persia is perhaps unsurprising (see below,
pp. 174, 193–5).
By the seventh century, the Armenians had long been Christian. The
inventor of their distinctive script,Mashtots‘, based it on the Greek alphabetical
model.He had received a Greek education, and Christian Armenia’s
literary culture drew heavily on the fourth-century Greek fathers as well
as Syriac writings (see below, p. 161). But the Armenians had their own
church hierarchy, headed by a catholicos, and the princely and noble families
in mountain strongholds debarred Romans and Sasanians alike from
outright control over their respective sectors in Caucasia. For Justinian and
his successors, the Armenian church posed a conundrum as intractable as
was the papacy to their west: Christian, notionally beneath their umbrella,
and yet highly articulate and prepared to defy the emperor and his senior
churchmen on matters of doctrine (see below, pp. 171–2). The Armenians
stood in the way of the idea of a Christian church coterminous with the
empire even as, individually and collectively, they made an extraordinary
contribution to its workings.25
Justinian’s legacy was, then, a singular concoction in unpredictable circumstances.
Its supreme and understated asset was flexibility, the capability
to withstand military setbacks through a blend of material safeguards, ad
hoc diplomacy, spiritual purity, ideological vision – and bluff. The ‘beacon’
was not only St Sophia but Constantinople itself, where law and order
were upheld and where the unceasing rites of empire and worship were
performed, shielded by imperial orthodoxy (see below, pp. 111–12, 114).
The emperor as beacon-keeper could still convincingly take charge of these
essentials, although in reality he was unable to direct the course of events
in all his provinces. Justinian’s reign can therefore be seen as prologue and
scene-setter for all that was to come, until the City of Constantinople actually
did fall to barbarians, albeit fellowChristians, in 1204. In many ways the
sixth century was the starting-point of the cycles of rebuffs and recoveries
that characterised the middle Byzantine period.
An alternative starting-point for our story might indeed have been the
sensational events of the mid-seventh century. The chapters belowsubscribe
to the widely held view that the eastern empire underwent massive shocks
in the seventh century: thereafter things were never quite the same again,
for all the restoration of order in many provinces and the semblance of
Roman continuity maintained in the capital.
The Arabs’ overrunning of the Levant and Egypt halted inflows to Constantinople
of taxes and resources from what had been by far the richest
provinces of the empire, dislocated distribution networks and military
funding, and in the words of a mid-seventh-century text left the empire
‘humiliated’.26 Few, if any, men of letters could see the point of celebrating
imperial deeds in the guise of classical heroics. Grand historical narratives
in the mould of Thucydides, such as Procopius’ or Theophylact
Simocatta’s, and rhetorical poems such as George of Pisidia’s in praise
of Heraclius’ campaigns against the Persians in the 620s, could scarcely
be cast from collapsing frontiers and incessant improvisation. As Averil
Cameron has pointed out, much was still written, but with regard to the
world of the spirit and the transcendent meaning of things, sermons, theological
tracts and disputations.27 The lights go out, so far as straightforward
narrative is concerned, and our main surviving Byzantine accounts of
events from around 640 onwards were not composed before the early ninth
century.
Yet this change in source-materials does not necessarily imply a corresponding
rupture in every single aspect of governance or of spiritual priorities
for all the inhabitants of the empire at that time. The differences in civil
administration and military organisation which are clear from our sources
for the ninth century cannot be dated precisely, and few scholars now subscribe
to George Ostrogorsky’s thesis that systematic military reforms and
creation of a theme system were carried out by Heraclius in immediate
response to the Arab invasions (see below, pp. 239–40, 266). The shifts of
overall responsibilities to military commanders (strat¯egoi) and their staffs in
the provinces may well have been provisional and fluctuating, with independent
civilian authorities still functioning through the eighth century.
The sixth and seventh centuries show sufficiently similar administrative
arrangements still in place and important processes of change continuously
underway to be viewed together in one part.
Moreover, as Andrew Louth shows in Chapter 4, disputes about doctrine
went on being fought out by churchmen under the emperor’s eye in the
mid-seventh century and an ecumenical council was convened in his City
reaches, the Danube continued to act as barrier, if not formal border, until
the Bulgars installed themselves south of the river in the early 680s; and
Carthage, an imperial administrative centre and strategic key to the central
Mediterranean, only fell to the Arabs in 698. Until around that time,
imperial statesmen may well have reckoned that the Arabs’ extraordinary
advances would eventually be repulsed, or would ebb away.
It therefore seems defensible to bracket the seventh century together
with the sixth as the time when the Christian empire first demonstrated its
capacity to go through massive earthly vicissitudes, military triumphs and
sudden reversals. For all the sense of imperial Roman continuity that Justinian’s
propaganda conjured up, his genius lay in providing for conditions
of incessant change.
World History
