The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade (28 page)

For the first time in over a hundred years, the empire teetered on the edge of a restoration. But communications between the emperor and his great general had disintegrated. Justinian became convinced that Belisarius intended to set himself up as king of Italy. Rather than allowing Belisarius to consolidate his conquests, he ordered the general to return to Constantinople. Belisarius began to travel back to Constantinople, with Witigis in tow, leaving a skeleton force in Italy to assert Byzantine control. To protect the Byzantine garrisons, Justinian made treaties with three northern tribal confederations (the Gepids, the Lombards, and the Heruls), convincing them to settle along the Italian border northeast of the mountains and act as buffers, should any other wandering peoples attempt to invade.
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29.2: The Reconquest of Roman Land

But as soon as Belisarius was gone, the remaining Ostrogoths elected a new king, a soldier named Totila, and began to fight back against Byzantine occupation. For the next decades, control of Italy would seesaw back and forth between Ostrogoth and Byzantine forces. Witigis died in captivity; Justinian’s tribal allies remained along the edges of the territory with their backs to the conflict. No one had enough men to bring the war to a decisive end. “The war has not turned out well to the advantage of either side,” an Ostrogothic ambassador remarked, which was an understatement.
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The wars in Italy and North Africa, not to mention the enormous building projects in Constantinople, had drained the treasury. The Eternal Peace stipulated that Byzantium would pay the Persian empire a yearly tribute, but Justinian could no longer afford it. The payments went into arrears. In June of 540, Khosru marched into Syria and sacked the ancient city of Antioch in punishment.
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Belisarius had not yet arrived back in Constantinople with his men, and without them Justinian simply did not have the manpower to fight back. He sent Khosru messages promising that he would send the tardy tribute just as soon as he was able to raise it; Khosru accepted the offer and began to retreat, very slowly, back through the Syrian province, taking captives from Antioch with him. As he went, he repaid himself for the campaign by demanding ransom money from the Byzantine cities along the way, threatening to burn them if they did not comply.
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Meanwhile, Justinian managed to scrape together the tribute. But Khosru insisted on leaving a Persian garrison within Roman territory. He also embarked on a building project designed to irritate the Byzantine emperor: he ordered his architects to construct an exact plan of the sacked city of Antioch, and then built a street-by-street replica of it in his own territory, at al-Mada’in. He settled his captives in it; the Arab historian al-Tabari writes, “When they entered the city’s gate, the denizens of each house went to the new house so exactly resembling their former one in Antioch that it was as if they had never left the city.” Most of the Persians called it al-Rumiyyah, “Town of the Greeks,” but Khosru called it “Built Better than Antioch.” Anticipating the beginning of war, he also built walls to fortify the city of Derbent, keeper of the Caspian Gates.
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Justinian, not anxious to scrape his bare treasury to fund yet more fighting, had sent a letter of appeal asking for peace to be restored, but Khosru ignored it. He was determined to bring a formal end to the Eternal Peace, and he invaded again in 541.

By this time Belisarius was back in the east, taking command of the Byzantine defense. He won a few smallish victories, but before long the war began to swing the Persian way; Khosru’s armies captured the fortress of Petra and the surrounding lands, and Belisarius’s attempt to retake the fortress of Nisibis failed.
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The fighting had not gone well for the Byzantine army, but a blacker enemy hovered. In 542, just as Khosru was crossing over the Euphrates for yet another assault on the Byzantine frontier, a ship docked at the Golden Horn. It brought much-needed grain from the mouth of the Nile; the cold dark summers of the previous years had reduced food supplies, and the population of the eastern empire was already hungrier and weaker than normal. But not long after the ship threw down its anchor, a sickness began to spread along the waterfront. It was an illness known to the ancients but new to the people of Constantinople: sudden fever, swellings in the groin and armpit, coma, and death.

Physicians, dissecting the bodies of the dead in an effort to find the cause, found strange abscesses filled with pus and dead tissue at the center of the swellings. They were at a loss: nothing seemed to stop the spread of the disease. At first, the deaths from the illness were no worse than from any other epidemic making its way through the crowded suburbs of Constantinople. But within days the mortalities had doubled and then doubled again. This was no mere epidemic. It had become a catastrophe without parallel: a pestilence, writes Procopius, “by which the whole human race came near to being annihilated.”
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The sickness burned through the city at full force for three entire months. “The tale of dead reached five thousand each day,” Procopius tells us, “and then came to ten thousand, and still more than that.” Some victims broke out with black pustules, “about as large as a lentil,” and died vomiting blood. Others, driven delirious by high fever, died screaming in pain when the swellings grew gangrenous and burst. Some took agonizing days to die. Others walked from their houses healthy and were struck down in the road by fever so sudden that they fell in their tracks and lay on the road until they died. “Nobody would go out of doors without a tag upon which his name was written, and which hung on his neck or arm,” writes John of Ephesus, who lived through the plague; that way, their disfigured bodies could be identified and claimed by surviving relatives.
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The sickness of Constantinople was bubonic plague (named for the swellings or “buboes”), carried by the fleas that travelled from port to port on ship’s rats. Bubonic plague had not struck Constantinople before, but the cold wet summers after 535 had a three-sided consequence: the drop in temperature provided the
Yersinia pestis
bacterium, the active agent of the plague, the perfect environment in which to flourish; years of poor harvests had forced Constantinople to increase its grain imports, bringing ships from all over the Mediterranean to the Golden Horn; and the people of Byzantium were weaker, hungrier, and more vulnerable than ever before. It was only a matter of time before one of those ships brought death to the city.

The population died, and died, and died. The historian Evagrius Scholasticus suffered from the swellings and survived, one of the few to live through the sickness. But he lost his wife, his children, and his grandchildren. “Some were desirous of death,” he wrote, in his otherwise dispassionate chronicle, “on account of the utter loss of their children and friends, and placed themselves as much as possible in contact with the diseased, and yet did not die, as if the pestilence struggled against their purpose.” The bodies of the dead were at first buried in Constantinople’s tombs. When those were filled, mass graves were dug all over the city. Ceremony was nonexistent; the bodies were slung into the graves as fast as possible. When Justinian (who himself suffered from buboes, according to Procopius, but recovered) realized that there was nowhere left to dig new graves, he ordered the tops of the towers just across the Golden Horn ripped off, and the towers themselves filled with bodies. “An evil stench pervaded the city,” Procopius writes, “and distressed the inhabitants still more.”
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Plague brought a temporary end to the war with Persia. The sickness appeared in Ctesiphon, and Khosru himself abandoned the battlefield, retreated back across the Euphrates, and went home to take care of his people. By the following year, plague had spread westward, as far as the lands of the Franks: Gregory of Tours records outbreaks of “swellings in the groin” in Arles in 543.

But the deadliness of the plague was also its weakness. By 543, it had killed so many people (as many as two hundred thousand in Constantinople alone) that it could no longer remain at full strength; it had run out of uninfected hosts, and began to decrease.

Which meant that Khosru was able to return. In 544, he made a great push against the Byzantine fortress of Edessa. If Edessa fell, Khosru could sweep across the Byzantine land all the way into Asia Minor, claiming it for his own. It was a well-defended fortress, and he planned the siege carefully: his men took their time, building a huge circular mound outside the city walls, painstakingly constructing it, layer by layer, from earth and timber. “Elevating it gradually, and pushing it forward towards the town,” Evagrius writes, “he raised it to a height sufficient to overtop the wall, so that the besiegers could hurl their missiles from vantage ground against the defenders.” The city’s defenders, desperate to bring the mound down, tunnelled underneath the city walls, dug a chamber under the mound, and tried to set a fire beneath it, but there wasn’t enough air in the underground chamber to feed the flames.
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Eventually, using a combination of sulfur and bitumen, they convinced the wood to burn. Smoke started to come up through the pile; to keep the Persians from discovering the fire underneath, the soldiers on the walls of the city shot burning arrows into the top of the mound, using the smoke of the smaller fires to conceal the larger one. Finally the pile of timber and earth went up in flames, and the mound came down.

Khosru sent his armies against the walls in a last attack, but the entire population of the city—women and children included—formed chains up to the walls, passing heated oil for those at the top to pour onto the attackers. The Persian soldiers began to retreat, and Khosru could not keep them moving forward. When an interpreter came out on the walls to offer a treaty, he accepted. The city paid him an enormous ransom in gold; he retreated, and not long afterwards concluded a five-year treaty with Justinian that brought temporary peace to both of the war-ravaged, plague-decimated empires.
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Both Procopius and Evagrius attribute the lifting of the siege of Edessa to a sacred object, a relic that had been kept in Edessa for centuries. According to the people of the city, a king named Abgar had ruled Edessa in
AD
30. He had fallen ill and had sent messengers to Jerusalem to ask the prophet Jesus to heal him. Jesus had written back, promising healing by means of the letter and the disciple who carried it; when the letter arrived in Edessa, Abgar was made well. Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, claimed in the early fourth century not only to have seen the letter, but to have translated it from the original Syriac.
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Before long, the story had expanded: the disciple was said to have brought not only the letter but also a miraculous cloth with the face of Jesus divinely imprinted on it. It was this cloth, known as the Mandylion, that the people of Edessa treasured. They believed, says Procopius, that the city could never be conquered as long as the Mandylion was inside it; Evagrius insists that the fire under the mound caught only after the Mandylion was washed in water and the water was sprinkled on the timber; the fire burned so hot that Khosru was forced to recognize “his disgraceful folly in having entertained an idea of prevailing over the God whom we worship.”
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Set beside the accounts of the plague, the story shows a world in which Christianity coexisted uneasily with the sheer power of natural forces. “For this calamity, there is no explanation, except indeed to refer it to God,” Procopius writes, baldly, and then later adds, “I am unable to say whether the cause of diversity in symptoms was to be found in the difference in bodies, or in the fact that it followed the wish of Him who brought the disease into the world.” Evagrius ascribes the course of the plague to “the good pleasure of God,” and for John of Ephesus, the horror was “a sign of grace and a call to repentance.”
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Yet none of the sixth-century historians suggest that Christ, who had lifted the siege at Edessa, might also lift the plague. War was human; plague was something else, something under God’s command yet also woven into the fabric of the universe.